Standards and regulations

Standards, and international standards at that, should serve only to enable the harmonious deployment of the technologies they describe. They must serve as a reference when these technologies are used in an open loop, and enable system interoperability. An interrogator conforming to a standard must be able to communicate with any tag conforming to the same standard, and vice versa. Later in this chapter, we'll see that for industrial applications, we sometimes need to go further than interoperability - we need to achieve interchangeability.

Before going any further into the subject of standards, it is important to distinguish between the objectives they are intended to achieve. The first category of standards is designed to enable the cohabitation of various systems sharing the same resource. In the case of RFID, the resource shared by several systems is of course...