Research gaps and trends in Radio Frequency Identification: Scoping review

BACKGROUND: RFID or Radio Frequency Identification is a technology for identifying objects or people. It is based on the use of radio waves to remotely read the data written on RFID transponder, commonly called an RFID tag. This technology has become one of the most promising research areas and has attracted growing interest, hence the need for a scoping review of this research field. OBJECTIVE: We intend to carry out a systematic map as part of a scoping review to clarify and show the current state of existing studies in the RFID area. METHOD: We followed the scoping review process defined by Petersen et al. [1] [2], based on a well-established research methodology from the medical and software engineering scientific communities. 219 primary studies were selected rigorously, subsequently a classification framework was applied to extract key information for further analysis. We synthesized the resulting data and produced a clear state-of-the-art. RESULTS: We outline the process of a Scoping Review applied to the field of RFID technology from a software engineering perspective. On this basis, this work contributes with (1) a general framework for classifying information on published studies in this disciplinary field, (2) a presentation of current research in the RFID field in a systematic map form, (3) a discussion of emerging results and their implications for future research. CONCLUSIONS: This scoping review provides an overview of the RFID field and, more importantly, identifies research gaps and future research directions for researchers, practitioners interested in RFID technology, reviewers and universities, and journal editors. One of the findings is that, although there is a lot of research being conducted in this area, a limited amount of work is focused on the problem of RFID data acquisition and processing, or in other words, on the “middleware” component of RFID systems.