research-article

R³: Reliable Over-the-Air Reprogramming on Computational RFIDs

Authors:
Die Wu

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
View Profile

,
Li Lu

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
View Profile

,
Muhammad Jawad Hussain

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
View Profile

,
Songfan Li

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
View Profile

,
Mo Li

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
View Profile

,
Fengli Zhang

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
View Profile

Authors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems Volume 17 Issue 1Article No.: 9pp 1–25https://doi.org/10.1145/3070720

Published:20 September 2017Publication History

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems

Abstract

Computational Radio Frequency Identification (CRFID) tags operate solely on harvested energy and have emerged as viable platforms for a variety of ubiquitous sensing and computation applications. Due to their battery-less nature, these tags can be permanently deployed in hard-to-reach places where the possibility of tag access is eliminated. In such scenarios, maintaining and upgrading the tag’s firmware becomes infeasible because programming tools, including wired interface and PC-based software, are required to erase, modify, or reprogram the microcontroller unit’s memory. Such limitations necessitate the demand for an over-the-air (OTA) scheme, which can wirelessly reprogram or upgrade the firmware in CRFID tags.

In this article, we present R³—a reliable OTA reprogramming scheme that is compliant with EPC protocol and requires no hardware upgrade to RFID reader or CRFID tag. We demonstrate our scheme on three platforms, which include both software-defined as well as chip-based CRFID tags, that is, WISP5.1 and Optimized WISP (Opt-WISP), and Spider tag, respectively. The selection also includes both the FLASH- and FRAM-based microcontrollers. We extensively evaluate our scheme in terms of several metrics, including overall system delay, time and energy overhead, and success rate in line with interrogation range. We foresee our endeavor to offer the viability of OTA reprogramming and firmware upgrade for CRFID tokens under practical situations.

References

ARMmbed. 2015. Firmware over the air FOTA updates. (March 2015). Retrieved March 21, 2017. Retrieved from https://developer.mbed.org/teams/Bluetooth-Low-Energy/wiki/Firmware-Over-the-Air-FOTA-Updates.Google Scholar
C. Bauer-Reich, Kay Chen Tan, F. Haring, N. Schneck, A. Wick, L. Berge, Jesse Hoey, Rudolf Sailer, and C. Ulven. 2014. An investigation of the viability of UHF RFID for subsurface soil sensors. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology (EIT’14). IEEE, 577--580.Google Scholar
Michael Buettner, Benjamin Greenstein, and David Wetherall. 2011. Dewdrop: An energy-aware runtime for computational RFID. In Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’11). Google ScholarDigital Library
Michael Buettner, Richa Prasad, Matthai Philipose, and David Wetherall. 2009. Recognizing daily activities with RFID-based sensors. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. ACM, 51--60. Google ScholarDigital Library
Michael Buettner and David Wetherall. 2011. A software radio-based UHF RFID reader for PHY/MAC experimentation. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on RFID (RFID’11). IEEE, 134--141.Google ScholarCross Ref
Rohit Chaudhri, Jonathan Lester, and Gaetano Borriello. 2008. An RFID based system for monitoring free weight exercises. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems. ACM, 431--432. Google ScholarDigital Library
Adam Chlipala, Jonathan Hui, and Gilman Tolle. 2004. Deluge: Data dissemination for network reprogramming at scale. University of California, Berkeley, Technical Report (2004).Google Scholar
Crossbow Technology, Inc. 2003. Mote In-network programming user reference (Jan. 2003).Google Scholar
Artem Dementyev and Joshua R. Smith. 2013. A wearable UHF RFID-based EEG system. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference onRadio Frequency Identificaion (RFID’13). IEEE, 1--7.Google Scholar
Robert F. Dickerson, Eugenia I. Gorlin, and John A. Stankovic. 2011. Empath: A continuous remote emotional health monitoring system for depressive illness. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Wireless Health. ACM, 5. Google ScholarDigital Library
Wan Du, Zhenjiang Li, Jansen Christian Liando, and Mo Li. 2016. From rateless to distanceless: Enabling sparse sensor network deployment in large areas. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 24, 4 (2016), 2498--2511. Google ScholarDigital Library
Wan Du, Jansen Christian Liando, Huanle Zhang, and Mo Li. 2015. When pipelines meet fountain: Fast data dissemination in wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. ACM, 365--378. Google ScholarDigital Library
EPCglobal. 2015. EPC Radio-Frequency Identity Protocols, Generation-2 UHF RFID, Specification for RFID Air Interface Protocol for Communications at 860MHz-960MHz, Version 2.0.1 Ratified. (April 2015). Retrieved May 29, 2016 from http://www.gs1.org/sites/default/files/docs/epc/Gen2_Protocol_Standard.pdf.Google Scholar
Farsens. 2015. ANDY100 evaluation board with integrated start-up circuit. (Sept. 2015). Retrieved May 29, 2016 from http://www.farsens.com/media/document/26/ds-spider-h254-v01.pdf.Google Scholar
Federico Gasco, Paolo Feraboli, Jeff Braun, Joshua Smith, Patrick Stickler, and Luciano DeOto. 2011. Wireless strain measurement for structural testing and health monitoring of carbon fiber composites. Comp. Part A: Appl. Sci. Manufactur. 42, 9 (2011), 1263--1274. Google ScholarCross Ref
Wei Gong, Kebin Liu, Xin Miao, and Haoxiang Liu. 2014. Arbitrarily accurate approximation scheme for large-scale RFID cardinality estimation. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM. IEEE, 477--485. Google ScholarCross Ref
Jeremy Gummeson, Shane S. Clark, Kevin Fu, and Deepak Ganesan. 2010. On the limits of effective hybrid micro-energy harvesting on mobile CRFID sensors. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services. ACM, 195--208. Google ScholarDigital Library
Jeremy Gummeson, Pengyu Zhang, and Deepak Ganesan. 2012. Flit: A bulk transmission protocol for RFID-scale sensors. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services. ACM, 71--84. Google ScholarDigital Library
Daniel Halperin, Thomas S. Heydt-Benjamin, Benjamin Ransford, Shane S. Clark, Benessa Defend, Will Morgan, Kevin Fu, Tadayoshi Kohno, and William H. Maisel. 2008. Pacemakers and implantable cardiac defibrillators: Software radio attacks and zero-power defenses. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P’’’08). IEEE, 129--142. Google ScholarDigital Library
Shibo He, Jiming Chen, Fachang Jiang, David K. Y. Yau, Guoliang Xing, and Youxian Sun. 2013. Energy provisioning in wireless rechargeable sensor networks. IEEE Trans. Mobile Comput. 12, 10 (2013), 1931--1942. Google ScholarDigital Library
Enamul Hoque, Robert F. Dickerson, and John A. Stankovic. 2010. Monitoring body positions and movements during sleep using WISPs. In Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Wireless Health. ACM, 44--53. Google ScholarDigital Library
Impinj. 2015. Octane SDK. (Oct. 2015). Retrieved May 29, 2016 from https://support.impinj.com/hc/en-us/articles/202755268-Octane-SDK.Google Scholar
Shan Jiang and Stavros V. Georgakopoulos. 2011. Optimum wireless power transmission through reinforced concrete structure. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID’11). IEEE, 50--56. Google ScholarCross Ref
Bryce Kellogg, Aaron Parks, Shyamnath Gollakota, Joshua R. Smith, and David Wetherall. 2015. Wi-Fi backscatter: Internet connectivity for RF-powered devices. ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 44, 4 (2015), 607--618. Google ScholarDigital Library
Libelium. 2016. Over the Air Programming (OTAP). (Jan. 2016). Retrieved May 29, 2016 from http://www.libelium.com/products/waspmote/ota/.Google Scholar
Vincent Liu, Aaron Parks, Vamsi Talla, Shyamnath Gollakota, David Wetherall, and Joshua R. Smith. 2013. Ambient backscatter: Wireless communication out of thin air. ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 43, 4 (2013), 39--50. Google ScholarDigital Library
Brandon Lucia and Benjamin Ransford. 2015. A simpler, safer programming and execution model for intermittent systems. In ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 50. ACM, 575--585. Google ScholarDigital Library
Pedro José Marrón, Andreas Lachenmann, Daniel Minder, Matthias Gauger, Olga Saukh, and Kurt Rothermel. 2005. Management and configuration issues for sensor networks. Int. J. Network Manage. 15, 4 (2005), 235--253. Google ScholarDigital Library
Saman Naderiparizi, Aaron N. Parks, Zerina Kapetanovic, Benjamin Ransford, and Joshua R. Smith. 2015. Wispcam: A battery-free RFID camera. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID’15). IEEE, 166--173. Google ScholarCross Ref
Brian Otis and Dan Yeager. 2009. SoCWISP: Ultra-low power wireless sensing RFID chip. In Proceedings of the WISP Summit Workshop.Google Scholar
Aaron N. Parks, Angli Liu, Shyamnath Gollakota, and Joshua R. Smith. 2014. Turbocharging ambient backscatter communication. In ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. Vol. 44. ACM, 619--630. Google ScholarDigital Library
Aaron N. Parks and Joshua R. Smith. 2014. Sifting through the airwaves: Efficient and scalable multiband RF harvesting. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID’14). IEEE, 74--81.Google Scholar
Matthai Philipose, Joshua R. Smith, Bing Jiang, Alexander Mamishev, Sumit Roy, and Kishore Sundara-Rajan. 2005. Battery-free wireless identification and sensing. IEEE Pervas. Comput. 4, 1 (2005), 37--45. Google ScholarDigital Library
Lane A. Phillips. 2005. Aqueduct: Robust and Efficient Code Propagation in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Colorado.Google Scholar
Benjamin Ransford. 2010. A rudimentary bootloader for computational RFIDs. UMass Amherst, Technical Report UM-CS-2010-061 (2010).Google Scholar
Benjamin Ransford, Shane S. Clark, Mastooreh Salajegheh, and Kevin Fu. 2008. Getting things done on computational RFIDs with energy-aware checkpointing and voltage-aware scheduling. HotPower 8 (2008), 5--5. Google ScholarDigital Library
Benjamin Ransford, Jacob Sorber, and Kevin Fu. 2012. Mementos: System support for long-running computation on RFID-scale devices. ACM SIGPLAN Notices 47, 4 (2012), 159--170. Google ScholarDigital Library
Niels Reijers and Koen Langendoen. 2003. Efficient code distribution in wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications. ACM, 60--67. Google ScholarDigital Library
Matt Reynolds and Stewart Thomas. 2009. The blue devil WISP: Expanding the frontiers of the passive RFID physical layer. In Proceedings of the WISP Summit Workshop.Google Scholar
Mastooreh Salajegheh, Yue Wang, Anxiao Andrew Jiang, Erik Learned-Miller, and Kevin Fu. 2013. Half-wits: Software techniques for low-voltage probabilistic storage on microcontrollers with NOR flash memory. ACM Trans. Embed. Comput. Syst. (TECS) 12, 2s (2013), 91. Google ScholarDigital Library
Yuanchao Shu, Yu Jason Gu, and Jiming Chen. 2014. Dynamic authentication with sensory information for the access control systems. IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst. 25, 2 (2014), 427--436. Google ScholarDigital Library
Joshua R. Smith. 2013. Wirelessly Powered Sensor Networks and Computational RFID. Springer Science 8 Business Media.Google Scholar
Thanos Stathopoulos, John Heidemann, and Deborah Estrin. 2003. A Remote Code Update Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks. Technical Report. DTIC Document. Google ScholarCross Ref
Jethro Tan. 2015. Robust Downstream Communication and Storage for Computational RFIDs. Ph.D. Dissertation. Department of Software Technology, Delft University of Technology.Google Scholar
Texas Instruments. 2012. Mixed Signal Microcontroller. (Jan. 2012). Retrieved May 29, 2016 from http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/msp430f2132.pdf.Google Scholar
Texas Instruments. 2013. MSP430x2xx Family User’s Guide. (July 2013). Retrieved May 29, 2016 from http://www.ti.com/lit/ug/slau144j/slau144j.pdf.Google Scholar
Texas Instruments. 2015. MSP430FR59xx Mixed-Signal Microcontrollers. (March 2015). Retrieved May 29, 2016 from http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/msp430fr5969.pdf.Google Scholar
Texas Instruments. 2016. MSP430FR58xx, MSP430FR59xx,MSP430FR68xx, and MSP430FR69xx Family User’s Guide. (May 2016). Retrieved May 29, 2016 from http://www.ti.com/lit/ug/slau367j/slau367j.pdf.Google Scholar
Arnaud Vena, Brice Sorli, Alain Foucaran, and Yassin Belaizi. 2014. A RFID-enabled sensor platform for pervasive monitoring. In Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Reconfigurable and Communication-Centric Systems-on-Chip (ReCoSoC’14). IEEE, 1--4.Google ScholarCross Ref
Jue Wang, Haitham Hassanieh, Dina Katabi, and Piotr Indyk. 2012. Efficient and reliable low-power backscatter networks. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2012 Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication. ACM, 61--72. Google ScholarDigital Library
Jennifer Wang, Erik Schluntz, Brian Otis, and Travis Deyle. 2015. A new vision for smart objects and the internet of things: Mobile robots and long-range UHF RFID sensor tags. arXiv:1507.02373 (2015).Google Scholar
Die Wu, Muhammad Jawad Hussain, Songfan Li, and Li Lu. 2016. R2: Over-the-air reprogramming on computational RFIDs. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID’16). IEEE, 1--8.Google ScholarCross Ref
Zhibin Xiao, Xi Tan, Xianliang Chen, Sizheng Chen, Zijian Zhang, Hualei Zhang, Junyu Wang, Yue Huang, Peng Zhang, Lirong Zheng, and Hao Min. 2015. An implantable RFID sensor tag toward continuous glucose monitoring. IEEE J. Biomed. Health Info. 19, 3 (2015), 910--919. Google ScholarCross Ref
Wenyu Yang, Die Wu, Muhammad Jawad Hussain, and Li Lu. 2015. Wireless firmware execution control in computational RFID systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID’15). IEEE, 129--136. Google ScholarCross Ref
Daniel Yeager, Fan Zhang, Azin Zarrasvand, Nicole T. George, Thomas Daniel, and Brian P. Otis. 2010. A 9 uA, addressable gen2 sensor tag for biosignal acquisition. IEEE J. Solid-State Circ. 45, 10 (2010), 2198--2209. Google ScholarCross Ref
Ibon Zalbide, Eduardo D’Entremont, Ainara Jimenez, Hector Solar, Andoni Beriain, and Roc Berenguer. 2014. Battery-free wireless sensors for industrial applications based on UHF RFID technology. In Proceedings of the IEEE 2014 Conference on Sensors. IEEE, 1499--1502. Google ScholarCross Ref
Hong Zhang, Jeremy Gummeson, Benjamin Ransford, and Kevin Fu. 2011. Moo: A batteryless computational RFID and sensing platform. Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Technical Report (2011).Google Scholar
Pengyu Zhang and Deepak Ganesan. 2014. Enabling bit-by-bit backscatter communication in severe energy harvesting environments. In Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’14). 345--357. Google ScholarDigital Library
Pengyu Zhang, Jeremy Gummeson, and Deepak Ganesan. 2012. Blink: A high throughput link layer for backscatter communication. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services. ACM, 99--112. Google ScholarDigital Library
Yuanqing Zheng and Mo Li. 2013. ZOE: Fast cardinality estimation for large-scale RFID systems. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE INFOCOM. IEEE, 908--916. Google ScholarCross Ref
Yuanqing Zheng and Mo Li. 2014. Towards more efficient cardinality estimation for large-scale RFID systems. IEEE/ACM Trans. Network. 22, 6 (2014), 1886--1896. Google ScholarDigital Library
Yuanqing Zheng and Mo Li. 2016. Read bulk data from computational RFIDs. IEEE/ACM Trans. Network. 24, 5 (2016), 3098--3108. Google ScholarDigital Library

Index Terms

R³: Reliable Over-the-Air Reprogramming on Computational RFIDs
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
    1. Embedded systems
      1. Firmware
    2. Sensors and actuators
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

Recommendations

Strengthening EPC tags against cloning
WiSe '05: Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Wireless security

The EPC (Electronic Product Code) tag is a form of RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) device that is emerging as a successor to the printed barcode. Like barcodes, EPC tags emit static codes that serve to identify and track shipping containers and ...
Read More
An Empirical Study for Protecting Passive RFID Systems against Cloning
ITNG '09: Proceedings of the 2009 Sixth International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations

RFID technology plays a key role in various areas of interest without guaranteeing security and privacy issues. Limitations of tag design make privacy and security enforcement a special challenge. In this paper, we introduce the essential components of ...
Read More
RFID: A Technical Overview and Its Application to the Enterprise

The need for retail and manufacturing companies to better track inventory and raw materials, and the decreasing cost of microchips have led to renewed interest in radio-frequency identification (RFID). Beginning with an overview of the basic technology, ...
Read More

Comments

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

Published in
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems Volume 17, Issue 1
Special Issue on Autonomous Battery-Free Sensing and Communication, Special Issue on ESWEEK 2016 and Regular Papers
January 2018
630 pages
ISSN:1539-9087
EISSN:1558-3465
DOI:10.1145/3136518
Editor:
Sandeep K. Shukla
Indian Institute of Technology, India
Issue’s Table of Contents
Copyright © 2017 ACM
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
Sponsors
In-Cooperation
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States

Journal Family
ACM Journals for the Design of Smart and Connected Systems
Publication History
- Published: 20 September 2017
- Accepted: 1 March 2017
- Revised: 1 December 2016
- Received: 1 June 2016
Published in tecs Volume 17, Issue 1

Permissions
Request permissions about this article.
Request Permissions

Check for updates
Author Tags
Computational RFID
EPC
OTA reprogramming
firmware upgrade
Qualifiers
- research-article
- Research
- Refereed
Conference
Funding Sources
Other Metrics
View Article Metrics

Article Metrics
- 4
  Total Citations
  View Citations
- 236
  Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)16
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Other Metrics
View Author Metrics
Cited By
View all

PDF Format

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

R³: Reliable Over-the-Air Reprogramming on Computational RFIDs

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems

Abstract

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Strengthening EPC tags against cloning

An Empirical Study for Protecting Passive RFID Systems against Cloning

RFID: A Technical Overview and Its Application to the Enterprise