CAPWAP and RFID Margaret Wasserman, ThingMagic IETF 66, Montreal

Brief Outline Similarities and differences between APs and RFID Readers Related work in EPCglobal –RFID industry standards body Requests from the EPCglobal Reader Operations WG –Minor requests, nothing RFID-specific Thoughts on DSP-only readers

AP vs RFID Reader Both moving towards centralized controller with remote “radios” Similar need to maintain firmware and configuration for the full system, not individual radios In RFID, data packets go to not thru the controller Controller Radio Management

Introduction to EPCglobal EPCglobal is an industry standards body working on RFID standards, largely for the retail supply chain EPC = “Electronic Product Code” EPCglobal is part of GS1, which is also responsible for the UPC and barcode standards For more information see:

EPCglobal Organization Broken into “action groups” –Software Action Group (SAG) –Hardware Action Group (HAG) –Busiess Action Group (BAG) Each Action Group consists of several WGs CAPWAP currently being considered as a discovery and provisioning protocol by the Reader Operations (RO) WG in the SAG

Request from EPCg RO WG Separate firmware download from reboot in the state table –More scalable –Allows trickle download with reboot at planned downtime Make a clearer distinction between CAPWAP “base protocol” and specific control functions

DSP-Only RFID Readers DSP-only RFID Readers are quite common Most popular DSPs in the space are 16-bit systems optimized for multiplication, not addition AES takes a lot of cycles in this environment Not clear what we can do, given lack of other DTLS encryption bindings…