This cutting-edge book serves as a comprehensive introduction to RFID, offering you a detailed understanding of design essentials and applications, and providing a thorough overview of management issues. By comparing RFID with WLAN and Bluetooth, this practical resource shows you how RFID technology can help you overcome many design challenges and limitations in the field. The book explains the design of electronic circuits, antennas, interfaces, data encoding schemes, and complete RFID systems. Starting with the basics of RF and microwave propagation, you learn about major system components including tags and readers. This hands-on reference distills the latest RFID standards, and examines RFID at work in supply chain management, intelligent buildings, intelligent transportation systems, and tracking animals. RFID is controversial among privacy and consumer advocates, and this book looks at every angle concerning security, ethics, and protecting consumer data. From design details... to applications... to socio-cultural implications, this authoritative volume offers the knowledge you need to create an optimal RFID system and maximize its performance.