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Efforts to reduce peak electrical demand has led to the introduction of demand response programs for residences. Demand response programs allow customers to reduce or shift their electrical consumption from peak periods in response to dynamic prices of electricity. Utility companies broadcasts the prices to the customers who then respond by reducing consumption during peak periods or shift the consumption to off-peak periods. Similarly, direct load control programs entice consumers with special rates or other incentives for allowing the utility to control load (typically air conditioning) for a number of days per year. Both uses require a ubiqituous and cost-effective communication network to allow utilities to communicate with users and appliances. The Radio Data System (RDS) has been identified as one strong candidate technology. However, security concerns arise due to the wireless nature of the communication channel. Source authentication is crucial in demand response to ensure that only authenticated messages are responded to.This report presents evaluations of cryptographic methods that could be employed to offer source authentication over the RDS network. Simulations are used to determine the impact on the network performance by employing digital signatures to allow source authentication. The simulations were calibrated with data collected in Ottawa, Canada, in particular to model signal propagation characteristics. While different environments experience different path losses, the relative comparisons are not impacted by this difference, however. The authentication schemes studied all provide strong authentication against attackers who attempt to forge signatures without knowledge of private keys (which are held at the transmitter). The information exposed in the transmitted messages will not help an attacker in forging future messages. And as messages are time-sensitive and the senders and receivers in the network coarsely time-synchronized, replay-attacks are prevented as well. This is different from shared-key/secret-key schemes such as the one employed in Zigbee, where exposure of the secret key on the receiver side (using bit sniffing or other techniques to access the non-volatile memory on the receiver) compromises the security/authentication of messages.The report presents comparisons of the security offered by the protocols, the bandwidth overhead, computational costs and message reception probability. Our simulation results show that, up to a distance of 90 km, all authentication schemes do not affect message reception by the receivers. Beyond that, all the schemes have an effect on message reception due to increased message sizes and receiver bootstrapping for BiBa and HORSE. ECDSA and HORSE outperform BiBa in terms of message reception beyond 90 km and the difference between the two is not significant. ECDSA however offers higher security than HORSE and BiBa but at the cost of increased computational complexity, in particular at the receivers. In addition, ECDSA has the highest bandwidt...

Abstract-This letter studies the possibilities of manufacturing copper-based passive ultrahigh frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) tags using inkjet and thermal printing on two substrate materials, polyimide (Kapton), and a polyester-based substrate (Flexcon THERMLfilm). Both printing methods are tested to fabricate different tag designs, and the performance of successfully printed tags is evaluated using wireless measurements. Measurement results show that both printing methods, while using copper material, can be used to effectively fabricate passive UHF RFID tag antennas on selected substrates.

We demonstrate that diode-switching can be used to introduce frequency agility into antennas produced by thermal transfer printing. Our particular example is a triangular Sierpinski fractal pattern with two PIN diodes to switch between operation optimised for the 800 MHz UHF band (diodes on) and the 2400 MHz ISM band (diodes off). Our measured results show an improvement in S11 in the UHF band from -2 dB to -28 dB, and from -7 dB to -30 dB at 2400 MHz, when switching the diodes appropriately. The measured bandwidth is 200 (1000) MHz, and the measured directivity is 3.1 dB (5.2 dB) while the measured gain is -5.2 dB (6.7 dB) for the diodes on(off).

Abstract:We compare the maximum read range of passive ultra high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that have been produced using different metal printing techniques, specifically inkjet printing and thermal transfer printing. We used the same substrate (THERMLfilm), antenna designs, and electronic circuitry in our comparison so as to isolate the effect of the metal printing. Due to the high metal conductivity, the thermal transfer printed tags printed with copper ink performed as well or better than the inkjet printed tags printed with silver ink, even when we changed the inkjet printed tags to a Kapton substrate that is better suited to inkjet printing. The aluminium thermal transfer printed tags had up to 33% less read range than copper thermal transfer printed tags. Thermal transfer printing needs no sintering, and provides an attractive alternative low-cost fabrication method. Characterisation of the printed traces by both methods reveals that the printing techniques achieve similar surface roughness between 19.8 nm and 21.2 nm RMS. The achieved conductivities for thermal transfer printing on THERMLfilm were 2.6⇥10 7 S/m and 3.9⇥10 7 S/m for aluminium and copper films respectively while inkjet printing achieved 1.7⇥10 7 S/m conductivity on the same substrate. The best measured read range 1 for THERMLfilm was 10.6m . Across the different tag designs, the measured read ranges were 15-60% (1-10%) better for thermal printing, compared to inkjet printing on THERMLfilm (Kapton).