Smart homes can apply new Internet-Of-Things concepts along with RFID technologies for creating ubiquitous services. This paper introduces a novel read-out method for a hierarchical wireless master-slave RFID reader architecture of multi standard NFC (Near Field Communication) and UHF (Ultra High Frequency) technologies to build a smart home service system that benefits in terms of cost, energy consumption and complexity. Various smart home service use cases such as washing programs, cooking, shopping and elderly health care are described as examples that make use of this system.
Internet of Things (IOT) is a concept [1] that visualizes bringing the internet even to dummy things in smart spaces like future home. By bringing the internet to dummy things, new services can be created and be used by things, devices and humans. To make the dummy things smart things, IOT report suggests Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as one of the enabler technologies. A RFID identification system is built based on a RFID reader, plurality of tags and a back-end system using network connectivity like WLAN [2] [3]. RFID reader can read the identification information from the tags and exchange it with the back-end system for further processing. There are a few architectural solutions in the market for using identification technologies at home. The first solution is to equip the appliance with a fixed RFID reader to identify the tags around the appliances. But the fixed RFID readers like UHF (Ultra High Frequency) standard are bulky and expensive for appliance level deployment [4] [5]. The second solution is to use a multi antenna RFID reader forseveral appliances with a dedicated antenna for each one [6]. This solution reduces the cost of individual appliance-level RFID readers. But it is not very stylish and needs quite cost-intensive cable installation and maintenance.