Read / Write Performance for low memory passive HF RFID tag-reader system

Certain applications of passive radio frequency identification (RFID), such as those in healthcare where the patient's name, identification or medical record must be stored, require data within a tag to be encrypted. Encrypted data within an RFID tag has the potential to affect the accuracy or time to read/write the data by the reader. The current research measures and analyzes the effects of encryption, distance of read and delay time between two read/write cycles on the accuracy of the read or write function in an RFID infrastructure. The research also measures and evaluates the time to read/write (R/W) data that is encrypted and compares this encrypted data with unencrypted data. The data encryption standard encryption method is used in this research due to the limitation of the tag. A multi-functional interface has been developed for the user to test the performance using a High Frequency RFID reader. The measurements were repeated 1000 times for each R/W test. The performance of R/W accuracy is not affected in any meaningful way by encryption even though there is an increase in memory requirement from 88 bytes to 128 bytes.