Automatic Control of Students´ Attendance in Classrooms Using RFID

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is one of the automatic identification technologies more in vogue nowadays. There is a wide research and development in this area trying to take maximum advantage of this technology, and in coming years many new applications and research areas will continue to appear. This sudden interest in RFID also brings about some concerns, mainly the security and privacy of those who work with or use tags in their everyday life. RFID has, for some time, been used to access control in many different areas, from asset tracking to limiting access to restricted areas. In this paper we propose an architecture and a prototype of a system that uses distributed RFID over Ethernet and we demonstrate how to automate an entire students´ attendance registration system by using RFID in an educational institution environment. Although the use of RFID systems in educational institutions is not new, it is intended to show how the use of it came to solve daily problems in our university.