1.1 Radio frequency identification Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a wireless data capturing technique which utilizes radio frequency (RF) waves for automatic identification of objects. RFID relies on RF waves for data transmission between the data carrying device, called the RFID tag, and the interrogator (Finkenzeller, 2003; Kraiser & Steinhagen, 1995) A typical RFID system is shown in Fig. 1. An RFID system consists of three major components: a reader or interrogator, which sends the interrogation signals to an RFID tag, which is to be identified; an RFID tag or transponder, which contains the identification code; and middleware software, which maintains the interface and the software protocol to encode and decode the identification data from the reader into a mainframe or personal computer. The RFID reader can read tags only within the reader’s interrogation zone. The reader is most commonly connected to a host computer which performs additional signal processing and has a display of the tag’s identity (Preradovic & Karmakar, 2007). The host computer can also be connected via internet for global connectivity/networking.