The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system is a widely used Auto-ID technology today to identify and track objects and people in manufacturing, inventory management, retailing, and security applications. The Zigbee technology, which is a recently emerged network communication protocol based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, provides a self-organized mesh network topology with a power-effective, low data rate and multi-hop data transmission. The RFID system could profit some of its features by introducing the Zigbee technology into the existing RFID architectures, such as having extended effective range, improving network flexibility and having compatibility with other Zigbee enabled environment systems. In this paper we first discuss the possible benefits and applications while applying Zigbee to the different parts of the RFID system. Then an integrated Zigbee RFID system architecture is discussed and a demo system is described at the end of the paper
