RFID-Enabled Logistic Flow Tracing in Supply Chains: Communication, Protocol, and Security

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an important ubiquitous computing technique used for automatic item identification and data capture. It has been widely deployed in various areas to automate previously labor-intensive inventory control and item identification. In this paper, we develop a framework to apply RFID in securely tracing of materials flows in supply chains. Timely and accurate material flow control is critical to supply chain visibility and improvement of the organizations´ competitive advantage. We develop a secure tag-reader authentication protocol to ensure the authenticity of RFID tags and readers. Our approach requires constant time in the best case in RFID database key search in order to identify a legitimate tag, which makes real-time item identification possible and also increases RFID system scalability.