Rallying around the new LLRP standard
Seven RFID technology providers have stepped forward to jointly support the EPC standard for reader protocol and collaborate on adoption.
By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 7/31/2007
Last week, seven RFID technology organizations announced support for a new standard ratified by EPCglobal in April.
The group is also collaborating on an open source toolkit for software developers that will encourage RFID adoption in the supply chain.
The organizations include:
The standard, ratified in April, is called the Low-Level Reader Protocol. LLRP, as it’s also known, will provide a common means for EPCglobal UHF Gen 2 RFID readers to communicate with a network, something EPCglobal refers to as the LLRP universal reader-to-network interface.
While that sounds complicated, the concept is really quite simple, according to Paul Dietrich, principal software architect for Impinj, a maker of Gen II RFID readers and a leading supplier of the silicon chips used in Gen II RFID tags.
“Readers on a network receive commands for operations as basic as powering on and off the reader,” says Dietrich. “Right now, every reader has its own unique protocol which has to be managed by the IT department. That’s fine if there’s only a few readers in a pilot, but it’s a real barrier to scaling up a deployment.”
Once RFID readers supporting the new protocol become commercially available, either late this year or early next year, “an end users’ IT support staff can learn about a single interface and use that across all their deployments,” says Dietrich. “And readers will interoperate, meaning you can use multiple brands on the same network.”
To encourage the development of new products using the LLRP standard, the seven companies have also created an LLRP Toolkit for software developers modeled after other successful open-source software developments. When it’s available later this year, the group says the toolkit will be a “one-stop shop” that includes a software library for LLRP programmers.
Dietrich says the coming together of seven technology companies to promote the new standard also represents an emerging trend in the RFID space.
“What we’re seeing is a coming together of various RFID hardware, software and service providers to speed the widespread adoption of RFID in the supply chain,” says Dietrich. “We’re focusing more on solutions to business problems than hardware and tags, and that often requires the input of several technology providers.”
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