This special issue aims at presenting the latest developments, trends, and research solutions for RFID technology, which received an enthusiastic response. There were 40 submissions, including six extended from the best papers of IWRT2008 (the 2nd International Workshop on RFID Technology, Barcelona, Spain), AiR2008 (the First International Workshop on Advances in RFID, Xi’an, China), and Industrial Track of SUTC2008 (IEEE International Conference on Sensor Networks, Ubiquitous, and Trustworthy Computing, Taichung, Taiwan). Eleven papers were selected after several rounds of review by the guest editors and the invited reviewers. These papers cover a wide range of topics in RFID research that reflect some key directions in this active yet diverse research area.

The first short paper, by the Guest Editors of this special issue Sheng et al. (2009), outlines some of the challenges and key research directions in the RFID area. Three articles in this special issue deal with security and privacy of RFID technology. The paper by Mitrokotsa et al., “Classifying RFID Attacks and Defenses” Mitrokotsa et al. (2009), provides a comprehensive overview of possible attacks that RFID networks may face. The authors categorize the weaknesses of the existing RFID communications, which could serve a foundation for better understanding of RFID attacks and defense against these attacks. The paper by Zuo, “Secure and Private Search Protocol for RFID Systems” Zuo (2009), proposes a set of protocols that enable an RFID reader to search for particular tags based on their identities or certain criteria. The third paper by Zhou et al., “A Lightweight Anti-Desynchronization RFID Authentication Protocol” Zhou et al. (2009), proposes a lightweight anti-desynchronization RFID authentication protocol that prevents attackers from de-synchronizing the shared secret between an RFID tag and its back-end server.

The next three articles focus on integration frameworks for RFID application development. The paper by Schwieren and Vossen, “ID-Services: An RFID Middleware Architecture for Mobile Applications” Schwieren and Vossen (2009), presents ID-Services, an RFID middleware architecture to support mobile applications. The paper by Ziekow and Günther, “Sharing RFID and Complex Event Data Among Organizations” Ziekow and Günther (2009), concerns the performance issue of the current standardization efforts (e.g., EPCglobal Network) in sharing and integrating RFID event data in distributed environments. The authors propose a peer-to-peer (P2P) based architecture for event-based interaction and a new method for in-network query processing. The paper by Sengupta and Schiller, “FlexRFID: A Design, Development and Deployment Framework for RFID-based Business Applications” Sengupta and Schiller (2009), describes FlexRFID, a modeling template for rapid prototyping RFID applications. It also describes a real-life RFID-enabled car parking system developed by FlexRFID.

The paper by Meng et al., “Automated Management of Assets Based on RFID Triggered Alarm Messages” Meng et al. (2009), reports the implementation of an industrial RFID application for asset management. The paper by Lopez et al., “Taxonomy, Technology and Applications of Smart Objects” Lopez et al. (2009), discusses the concept of smart objects. The authors propose a classification of smart objects, overview the key enabling technologies, and depict some promising applications of smart objects.

The remaining three articles accepted in this special issue will appear in a separate issue as regular papers due to space constraint. The paper by Li et al., “TMS-RFID: Temporal Management of Large-Scale RFID Applications” Li et al. (2009), presents TMS-RFID, a system for temporal management of RFID applications over high-speed RFID data streams. The authors propose a comprehensive model based on the notion of time to live (TTL), for efficient handling of RFID data streams. They also develop a new data structure, namely DLSlist, to solve the problem of unordered event streams. The paper by Hsu et al., “Threshold Jumping and Wrap-Around Scan Techniques toward Efficient Tag Identification in High Density RFID Systems” Hsu et al. (2009), deals with the challenge in identifying high density RFID tags in large-scale RFID systems. The authors propose two enhanced tree-based tag identification techniques, namely Threshold Jumping and Wrap-around Scan to minimize tag identification cost and improve the performance. The paper by Choi and Oh, “Tag-Only Aging-Counter Localization for the R-LIM2 System” Choi and Oh (2009), addresses the localization problem of books in libraries. They present a cost-effective RFID-based Library Management (RF-LIM) system that makes use of inexpressive RFID tags. The RF-LIM system exploits their proposed aging-counter localization algorithm which helps to identify the relative location of books and signals their locations to users. This interesting localization approach can be applied not only to locate books in libraries but also to other interesting applications such as patient tracking and robot positioning.

The papers included in this special issue cover a wide range of topics and present some of the key directions in this vibrant and rapidly expanding area of research and development. We hope that the set of selected papers provides the community with a better understanding of the current directions and areas to focus in future, and inspires your own work.