
34 CHAPTER TWO
The two other components shown inside the enterprise data center in Figure 2-5 are the
enterprise service bus and enterprise applications. The enterprise service bus is any mech-
anism that your company may have selected for application integration. Standards-based
products that facilitate this are now available. Enterprise applications are any applications
that are clients of, or are otherwise affected by, RFID data in your enterprise.
With this basic introduction complete, let’s look at the primary RFID components in
greater detail.
Tags
As we discussed in Chapter 1, the term “RFID” is typically used to describe systems
wherein a base station of some sort (a reader) is able to recognize another electronic
device (a tag) using one of several possible wireless transmission mechanisms. These
mechanisms may include microwave but not infrared or visible light systems. Since a
reader is able to identify a particular tag, the system can claim to have identified the object
to which that tag is attached. Tags may be housed in small plastic buttons, glass capsules,
paper labels, or even metal boxes. They may be glued to a package, embedded in a person
or an animal, clamped to a garment, or hidden in the head of a key.
To understand how an RFID tag notifies a reader about its presence and identity, consider
the simple scenario depicted in Figure 2-6. In this figure, the RFID reader transmits ...