Whitepaper: An In-Depth User's Guide To Selecting And Deploying Gen2 Tags, Readers, And Infrastructure

The second generation UHF air protocol for Class 1 RFID tags and readers (Gen2) promises to solve many of the problems discovered in pilot deployments based on the first generation protocols. Gen2 provides powerful capabilities that will enable broader adoption of passive RFID. It is a complex specification that contains many features which, when exercised in the proper ways, can achieve a level of performance not previously seen in RFID. If however, they are exercised incorrectly, they may offer little benefit. An air protocol alone is not enough to fix all problems of RFID deployment; a complete system design is still necessary.

Furthermore, it is easy to design Gen2 equipment that does not optimally implement each of the RF features made available by the protocol, resulting in conformance without performance. This paper is intended to help end users understand the different Gen2 capabilities that are meaningful to them, what the performance tradeoffs are in the different operating modes, and how to avoid pitfalls when specifying the purchase of "Gen2" tags, readers, and infrastructure.