In the World of RFID

We all love to see the “new and improved” label on anything, from our laundry detergents to our digital cameras, to our cars. Now there may be an emerging technology that “one ups” RFID, providing an answer to some of the most vexing questions facing the RFID market today such as reading around and through water and metals and providing a cost-effective means for item-level tagging. It is known as RuBee, and this technology, which has already been heralded by industry observers as “RFID 2.0,” may be the most exciting development of this year – and the next - in the global identification market.

What is RuBee?

RuBee is the commercial name for what is officially known as LWID (Long Wavelength ID), as defined by The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ (IEEE). The moniker was given to the technology by engineers at Miami-based Visible Assets, who coined the name for LWID technology after the hit 1967 Rolling Stones’ song, “Ruby Tuesday.”

In June, the IEEE announced that it had formed a working group to begin work on a new visibility network protocol standard, which will be known as IEEE P1902.1. The standard, which the IEEE hopes to have in place by the second half of 2007, will provide physical and data-link protocols, based on RuBee technology. According to the IEEE, RuBee “will provide for asset visibility networking that fills the gap between the non-networked, non-programmable, backscattered, RFID tags widely used for asset tracking and the high-bandwidth radiating protocols.” The technology is similar to Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11), Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15), and Zigbee (802.15.4), all of which are based on radiating transceivers.

There has been intense debate within the industry and press over whether RuBee is or isn’t “RFID.” As can be seen in the figure below right, the technologies are almost polar opposites (no pun intended). RuBee uses almost exclusively magnetic energy rather than the electrical – or radio frequency - energy used with HF and UHF RFID. RuBee operates at low frequencies, below 450 kHz and optimally at 132 kHz, which is far below the AM radio band. Because RuBee uses only microwatts of magnetic energy to communicate between the tag and the reader (known as a router, which is simpler in design and lower in cost than RFID readers), RuBee alleviates any of the safety concerns with traditional RFID. Because the technology uses low frequencies that are not attenuated by water and metal, RuBee tags can be read in and around environments that contain high amounts of liquid and metal far more accurately than traditional RFID. RuBee tags have been demonstrated to be readable even when buried underground.

Reading capabilities

The reading capabilities of RuBee are starkly different to those of traditional RFID technology, with read ranges far higher than UHF and HF RFID. Using volumetric loop antennas (as opposed to dipole for traditional RFID), RuBee has been shown to have a far greater read range than passive RFID tags, with performance estimates ranging from a radius of 8-20 feet (using a 1 square foot antenna) to as high as 100 feet x 100 feet, meaning a possible read range of approximately 10,000 square feet. Today’s RuBee tags are active, in that they are powered coin-sized lithium batteries, which are low cost and have an expected life of between 10 and 15 years. The IEEE P1902.1 standard will also cover passive RuBee tags, which are presently under development, but which would harvest energy and reflect magnetic signals in the same manner as passive RFID tags. From the viewpoint of Reik Read, lead RFID analyst for Robert W. Baird & Company, “The key downside element of the RuBee technology in comparison to RFID is a slower read rate.” While HF RFID tags can be read today at 100 per second and UHF tags can be read at up to 150 to 200 per second, the read rates for RuBee tags are approximately 6-10 per second. While such read rates will make RuBee impractical for most supply chain and postal/shipping applications, the slower rates could actually work in its favor in other venues, such as animal identification, assuring product authenticity, and medical applications. Also, while the read rates are far slower, the read accuracy of RuBee tags has been shown to be superior in tests and pilot applications to EPC-RFID tags, with less susceptibility to ambient noise and other RF signals.

A visibility rather than a tracking tool

And yet, speed is not everything. According to John Stevens, chair of the IEEE’s P1902.1 Working Group and chairman of Visible Assets, the concept is that “RuBee is a visibility tool, whereas RFID is a tracking tool.” RuBee is thus envisioned as a “visibility” system, providing far more information than the simple tracking of objects or products through an assembly line or in a warehouse. While tracking systems collect data on where an object has been, visibility systems can provide for both a real-time information system on the status of people and objects, as well as historical information on items and an audit trail on objects (which has become extremely important for corporations operating in the United States today in the wake of the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act). As such, RuBee thus presents intriguing technological advantages and conceptual design differences over the traditional EPC-RFID model. The design of RuBee technology also allows for peer-to-peer communications, not only between tags and routers, but between tags themselves. With this capability, the tags could be programmed to issue “pair-wise” matching alarms, so that each RuBee tag could be used to provide an alert if an item was shoplifted from a smart shelf in a retail setting or if there was an unauthorized removal of a controlled substance or a high-value item. The P1902.1 standard will also have a “real-time, tag searchable” protocol for RuBee tags, which will allow for tags to have unique “.tag” URLs associated with them and be searchable via the Internet. As opposed to the EPC model, where tag memory is kept to a minimum and the tag is a pointer to records and information on the tagged item, RuBee tags will be designed to have memory capacity to carry information on the item. As John Stevens recently commented: “If you’ve got 50 items on a conveyor that need to be read in under a second, RFID will work, but if you have a product where you want access to internal records inside a warehouse and want to find out about its history from the day it was born... that’s visibility.” With these capacities, however, RuBee tags will cost far less than any competitive active RFID tags presently on the market.

Likely applications for RuBee

Writing in Computer Power User, Kyle Schurman projected that the market prospects for RuBee are bright because “this new technology should fill in some of the gaps in the market that RFID can’t meet.” Indeed, with its differentiated capabilities, RuBee may be ideally suited for a wide variety of applications.

In the retail environment, RuBee could be used in a highly effective manner for item-level tagging for inventory control purposes: tagging consumer electronics products and around the omnipresent metal shelving and rack systems found in the retail and warehouse environment, both of which bedevil RFID tag read rates due to high metal contents, are two such areas. RuBee also provides additional security in retail applications, as the peer-to-peer communications capabilities of RuBee tags can provide an alert when items are removed. Thus, there may even be room in the retail market for RuBee tags to be used in tandem with EPC-RFID tags on high value items, much as has been proposed for the dual use of RFID and barcodes on items for some time to come. RuBee also has promising capabilities for smart asset management.

Beyond retail, RuBee can be used for tagging high-value, critical need items in healthcare applications, such as in emergency departments, operating rooms, and intensive care units, as well as in other venues where it is essential to properly outfit and monitor equipment, operations, and vehicles. It could also provide new levels of security when used for employee access cards and identification badges, enabling larger spaces to be monitored with fewer infrastructure costs. As magnetic waves are not absorbed by highly liquid human or animal tissues, RuBee is ideal for medical implants or equipment identification. It also affords great possibilities for animal identification, as historical records on animals could be immediately accessible and updateable. Thus, RuBee tags could be implanted in livestock and domesticated animals, as well exotic animals, on farms, in zoos, or in high-value breeding operations, such as horse farms. They could also be implanted in endangered animals in the wild for tracking purposes as well. Likewise, RuBee tags could be used to improve human health care, finding uses in patient wristbands and surgical devices to prevent medical errors. When combined with sensor capabilities, RuBee equipped implantable devices could provide the ability to monitor patient vital signs and even pH and glucose levels.

Another tool in the toolbox

In sum, as Toby Rush, president of systems integrator Rush Tracking Systems, put it, “RuBee is just one more tool in our toolbox to provide visibility for the enterprise” And, as we have seen with RFID, the technology will likely find unexpected and surprising applications in the coming years. Thus, at present, we stand at the threshold of a very exciting period in the development of radio – and magnetic – identification technologies. With the finalization of the IEEE protocol standard in the second half of 2007, it is likely that we will see an upsurge of interest and investment in RuBee technology. Already, RuBee has the support of leading technology providers, including Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sony, Panasonic, Motorola and NCR and the interest of retailers. It also has drawn interest from leading retailers, including Best Buy in the US, UK-based Tesco, Metro Group in Germany, and France’s CarreFour. However, it is unlikely that RuBee will be, as one industry analyst put it, “the death knell” for RFID. Rather, as veteran RFID analyst Pete Abell with IDC’s Manufacturing Insights recently commented, the emergence of RuBee is proof that “the RFID world moving forward is not going to be a one-size-fits-all environment.” Steve Winkler, a standards architect for SAP, recently observed that: “There is enough room for peaceful co-existence and even a symbiotic relationship between the two technologies. RuBee can ride the coat-tails of RFID’s popularity to gain adoption, while RFID vendors don’t have to try to be the be-all end-all and can focus on the scenarios to which they are best suited.”