Methodology for Testing RFID Applications

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a promising technology for process automation and beyond that capable of identifying objects without the need for a line-of-sight. However, the trend towards automatic identification of objects also increases the demand for high quality RFID applications. Therefore, research on testing RFID systems and methodical approaches for testing are needed. This thesis presents a novel methodology for the system level test of RFID applications. The approach called ITERA, allows for the automatic generation of tests, defines a semantic model of the RFID system and provides a test environment for RFID applications. The method introduced can be used to gradually transform use cases into a semi-formal test specification. Test cases are then systematically generated, in order to execute them in the test environment. It applies the principle of model based testing from a black-box perspective in combination with a virtual environment for automatic test execution. The presence of RFID tags in an area, monitored by an RFID reader, can be modelled by time-based sets using set-theory and discrete events. Furthermore, the proposed description and semantics can be used to specify RFID systems and their applications, which might also be used for other purposes than testing. The approach uses the Unified Modelling Language to model the characteristics of the system under test. Based on the ITERA meta model test execution paths are extracted directly from activity diagrams and RFID specific test cases are generated. The approach introduced in this thesis allows to reduce the efforts for RFID application testing by systematically generating test cases and the automatic test execution. In combination with meta model and by considering additional parameters, like unreliability factors, it not only satisfies functional testing aspects, but also increases the confidence in the robustness of the tested application. Mixed with the instantly available virtual readers, it has the potential to speed up the development process and decrease the costs - even during the early development phases. ITERA can be used for highly automated testing, reproducible tests and because of the instantly available readers, even before the real environment is deployed. Furthermore, the total control of the RFID environment enables to test applications which might be difficult to test manually. This thesis will explain the motivation and objectives of this new RFID application test methodology. Based on a RFID system analysis it proposes a practical solution on the identified issues. Further, it gives a literature review on testing fundamentals, model based test case generation, the typical components of a RFID system and RFID standards used in industry.Integrative Test-Methodology for RFID Applications (ITERA) - Project: Eurostars!5516 ITERA, FKZ 01QE1105

Digitally Fabricated Epidermal Transfer Tattoo UHF Radio Frequency Identification Tags

This thesis focuses on the inkjet printing of UHF RFID tags in the form of transfer tattoos for use on the skin. Inkjet printing of these tags is proposed as a cheaper and more appropriate alternative to conventional etching. The work seeks to assesses the performance of inkjet printed epidermal RFID tags using parameters such as read range, transmitted power and backscattered power. The effect of different printing parameters such as the number of conductive ink layers, sintering time and temperature on the performance of the tags are assessed by simulation and measurement. Additionally, techniques to reduce the volume of conductive ink used for the fabrication of the tag are also examined and compared with an aim to determine which has the best achieved read range and ink utilization balance. This would help to reduce the cost of fabrication of the tags. Also, due to some defects being introduced to the tags during the printing process because of printing conditions and characteristics inherent to the printing technology, the effects of these defects on the performance of the printed tag is also examined by simulation and measurement. The robustness of the epidermal transfer tattoo tag was further experimentally determined by exposure to everyday use conditions and situations involving sweat and mechanical friction. Finally, a diversity study on an inkjet printed tag integrated with a medical sticking plaster was performed. This involved the use of two to four tags placed horizontally and vertically in order to determine which orientation offers better read coverage in each of the diversity setups while a volunteer carried out a set of motions

A Systematic Framework for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Hazard Mitigation in the Blood Transfusion Supply Chain from Donation to Distribution

The RFID Consortium is developing what will be the first FDA-approved use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to identify, track, manage, and monitor blood throughout the entire blood transfusion supply chain. The iTraceTM is an innovative technological system designed to optimize the procedures currently employed when tracing blood from the donor to the recipient. With all novel technologies it is essential to consider not only the advantages, but also the potential harms that may come about from using the system. The deployment of the iTraceTM consists of two phases: 1) Phase One - application of the iTraceTM from the donor to blood center distribution, and 2) Phase Two - application of the iTraceTM from blood center distribution to transfusion. This dissertation seeks to identify the possible hazards that may occur when utilizing the iTraceTM during Phase One, and to assess the mitigation and correction processes to combat these hazards. A thorough examination of verification and validation tests, as well as of the system design, requirements, and standard operating procedures was performed to qualify and quantify each hazard into specific categories of severity and likelihood. A traceability matrix was also established to link each hazard with its associated tests and/or features. Furthermore, a series of analyses were conducted to determine whether the benefits of implementing the iTraceTM outweighed the risks and whether the mitigation and correction strategies of the hazards were effective. Ultimately, this dissertation serves as a usable, generalizable framework for the management of RFID-related hazards in the blood transfusion supply chain from donor to blood center distribution

Internet of Things Strategic Research Roadmap

Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated part of Future Internet including existing and evolving Internet and network developments and could be conceptually defined as a dynamic global network infrastructure with self configuring capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual “things” have identities, physical attributes, and virtual personalities, use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network

Exploring the relationship between spatial cognitive ability and movement ecology

Spatial cognitive ability is hypothesised to be a key determinant of animal movement patterns. However, empirical demonstrations linking intra-individual variations in spatial cognitive ability with movement ecology are rare. I reared ~200 simultaneously hatched pheasant chicks per year over three years in standardised conditions without parents, controlling for the confounding effects of experience, maternal influences and age. I tested the chicks on spatial cognitive tasks from three weeks old to obtain measures of inherent, early-life spatial cognitive ability. Each year, I released birds when 10 weeks old into an open-topped enclosure in woodland. Birds dispersed from this enclosure after about one-month. Importantly, all birds were released into the same, novel area simultaneously, thus their experiences and opportunities were standardised. I remotely tracked pheasant movement through either RFID antenna placed under 43 supplementary feeders situated throughout our field site (2016) or by using a novel reverse-GPS tracking system (2017-2018). Spatial cognitive ability, determined through binary spatial discrimination (2016) or a Barnes maze (2017), was related to the diversity of foraging sites an individual used (Chapter 2: 2016). Those with better spatial cognitive ability used a more diverse range of artificial feeders than poor performing counterparts, perhaps to retain a buffer of alternative foraging sites where resource profitability was known. I found no relationship between the timing of daily foraging onset between birds of differing cognitive ability (Chapter 3; 2016), which I had hypothesised to be a consequence of birds developing efficient routes between refuges and feeders. After establishing a reverse GPS system on our field site (Chapter 4: 2017), I collected more detailed information about pheasant movement and found that birds with higher accuracy scores on the cognition tasks initially moved between foraging and resting sites more slowly than inaccurate birds in novel environments, perhaps to gather more detailed information. Accurate birds increased their speed over one month to match the same speed as inaccurate birds. All birds increased the straightness of their routes at a similar rate. Lastly, I found intraspecific differences in the orientation strategy that birds used to solve a dual strategy maze task (Chapter 5: 2018). These differences predicted habitat use after release: birds that utilised landmarks (allocentric strategies) showed less aversion to urban habitats (farm buildings/yards) than egocentric/mixed strategy birds, which is potentially due to the presence of large, stable landmarks within these habitats. In this thesis, I provide several empirical links between spatial cognitive ability and movement ecology across a range of ecological contexts. I suggest that very specific cognitive processes may govern particular movement behaviours and that there is not one overarching general spatial ability.European Commissio

Methods to improve the reliability and resiliency of near/sub-threshold digital circuits

Energy consumption is one of the primary bottlenecks to both large and small scale modern compute platforms. Reducing the operating voltage of digital circuits to voltages where the supply voltage is near or below the threshold of the transistors has recently gained attention as a method to reduce the energy required for computations by as much as 6 times. However, when operating at near/sub-threshold voltages (where the supply voltage is near or below the threshold of the transistors), imperfections in transistor manufacturing, changes in temperature, and other difficult-to-predict factors cause wide variations in the timing of Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) circuits due to an increased sensitivity at lower voltages. These increased variations result in poor aggregate performance and cause increased rates of error occurrence in computation. This work introduces several new methods to improve the reliability of near/sub-threshold circuits. The first is a design automation technique that is used to aid in low-voltage digital standard cell synthesis. Second, two circuit-level techniques are also introduced that aim to improve the reliability and resiliency of digital circuits by means of completion/error detection. These techniques are shown to improve speed and lower energy consumption at low overheads compared to previous methods. Most importantly, these circuit-level methods are specifically designed to operate at low voltages and can themselves tolerate variations and operation in harsh environments. Finally, a test-chip prototype designed in 65nm-CMOS demonstrates the practicality and feasibility of a proposed current sensing error detector

An Integrative Analytical Framework for Internet of Things Security, Forensics and Intelligence

The Internet of things (IoT) has recently become an important research topic because it revolutionises our everyday life through integrating various sensors and objects to communicate directly without human intervention. IoT technology is expected to offer very promising solutions for many areas. In this thesis we focused on the crime investigation and crime prevention, which may significantly contribute to human well-being and safety. Our primary goals are to reduce the time of crime investigation, minimise the time of incident response and to prevent future crimes using collected data from smart devices. This PhD thesis consists of three distinct but related projects to reach the research goal. The main contributions can be summarised as: • A multi-level access control framework, presented in Chapter 3. This could be used to secure any collected and shared data. We decided to have this as our first contribution as it is not realistic to use data that could be altered in our prediction model or as evidence. We chose healthcare data collected from ambient sensors and uploaded to cloud storage as an example for our framework as this data is collected from multiple sources and is used by different parties. The access control system regulates access to data by defining policy attributes over healthcare professional groups and data classes classifications. The proposed access control system contains policy model, architecture model and a methodology to classify data classes and healthcare professional groups. • An investigative framework, that was discussed in Chapter 4, which contains a multi-phased process flow that coordinates different roles and tasks in IoT related-crime investigation. The framework identifies digital information sources and captures all potential evidence from smart devices in a way that guarantee potential evidence is not altered so it can be admissible in a court of law. • A deep learning multi-view model, which we demonstrated in Chapter 5, that explores the relationship between tweets, weather (a type of sensory data) and crime rate, for effective crime prediction. This contribution is motivated by the need to utilise police force deployment correctly to be present at the right times. Both the proposed investigative framework and the predictive model were evaluated and tested, and the results of these evaluations are presented in the thesis. The proposed framework and model contribute significantly to the field of crime investigation and crime prediction. We believe their application would provide higher admissibility evidence, more efficient investigations, and optimum ways to utilise law enforcement deployment based on crime rate prediction using collected sensory data

Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Production Systems and Logistics (CPSL 2021)

Proceedings of the CPSL 202

Energy-efficient Communication and Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks

This thesis focuses on the energy efficiency in wireless networks under the transmission and information diffusion points of view. In particular, on one hand, the communication efficiency is investigated, attempting to reduce the consumption during transmissions, while on the other hand the energy efficiency of the procedures required to distribute the information among wireless nodes in complex networks is taken into account. For what concerns energy efficient communications, an innovative transmission scheme reusing source of opportunity signals is introduced. This kind of signals has never been previously studied in literature for communication purposes. The scope is to provide a way for transmitting information with energy consumption close to zero. On the theoretical side, starting from a general communication channel model subject to a limited input amplitude, the theme of low power transmission signals is tackled under the perspective of stating sufficient conditions for the capacity achieving input distribution to be discrete. Finally, the focus is shifted towards the design of energy efficient algorithms for the diffusion of information. In particular, the endeavours are aimed at solving an estimation problem distributed over a wireless sensor network. The proposed solutions are deeply analyzed both to ensure their energy efficiency and to guarantee their robustness against losses during the diffusion of information (against information diffusion truncation more in general)

La projection d'usage des TICs : la composition de fictions axiomatiques au service de la recherche technologique

Innovation is today a major and strategic asset for organisations that compete in a hypercompetitive world (D'Avenir & Gunther, 1994). They are trying to face these new challenges, by using a diversity of “expert systems” typical of our « advanced modernity » (Giddens, 1990). Amongst those, boosting R&D activities is major inputs that demand the use of different expertises. Speculative researches for innovation are one of them. They take place in the “Fuzzy Front End” of innovation, a place where the construction of the social reality of invention is made : its usage, or to be more precise, its projection. Our thesis examines these knowledge-producing technologies and tries to make understable the policies at work, the performance of embedded collectives on the innovation itself, and on themselves, and the arrangements made during this process. Our work in the Grenoble industrial area and collaboration with the CEA-LETI helped us to propose an understanding of these projections as compositions of axiomatic fictions for technological research. Analysing the concept of usage, we highlight its careers and the mutation of associated practices. Interrogating one form of projection, the scenario, we show the links that lie between fiction and perfomativity. By leaning on the project mutating components, we demonstrate the axiomatic character of the projection, understood as a form of answer made to a social demand that comes from different places, and whose necessity of actionnable knowledge is solved by composing with moving data.L'« hypercompétitivité » (D'Avenir & Gunther, 1994) qui caractérise notre environnement économique contemporain fait de l'innovation une préoccupation stratégique pour les organisations. Celles-ci tentent de répondre à cette injonction par le recours à une multitude de « systèmes experts », caractéristique de la « modernité avancée » (Giddens, 1990). Parmi ceux-ci, la stimulation des activités de R&D est reconnue comme une contribution majeure qui nécessite l'utilisation croissante de champs d'expertises variés. C'est dans ce contexte que les sciences sociales sont mobilisées comme forme d'expertise contributives des « recherches spéculatives pour l'innovation » (Stewart & Claeys, 2009). Ces recherches interviennent en amont de processus d'innovation, en un lieu nommé « Fuzzy Front End » (Smith & Reinertsen, 1995), lieu dans lequel se forge la construction de la réalité sociale de l'invention : son usage ou plutôt sa projection. Notre thèse s'interroge sur ces technologies de production de connaissances que sont les projections d'usage et ambitionne de rendre intelligibles les politiques qu'elles mettent en oeuvre, la performance des collectifs mobilisés sur les recherches et sur eux-mêmes ainsi que les arrangements déployés par les acteurs durant ces processus. Notre immersion dans le tissu industriel grenoblois, et en particulier dans l'environnement du CEA-LETI, nous a permis de proposer une lecture des projections d'usage comme des compositions de fictions axiomatiques au service de la recherche technologique. En scrutant le concept d'usage, nous mettons en lumière les carrières empruntées par celui-ci et les mutations des pratiques associées. En interrogeant l'une des formes de la projection d'usage, le scénario, nous mettons en évidence les liens entre performativité et recours à la fiction. En interrogeant les mutations des composantes du projet, nous démontrons le caractère axiomatique des projections, en tant que forme de réponse à une demande sociale qui émane de plusieurs endroits et dont l'exigence de production de savoirs actionnables nécessite de composer avec des données en mouvement