The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has approved a standard for RuBee, a technology that is a bit like RFID but can be used in harsher environments such as underwater or in firearms.
Steel, liquids, animals and people, among other things, can disrupt RFID (radio frequency identification), according to Visible Assets, the small company that developed RuBee. Visible Assets sponsored the development of the new IEEE 1902.1 standard along with Seiko Epson, one of its licensees. It took about three years to complete the specification, according to Visible Assets CEO John Stevens.
RuBee gets around some of the limitations of RFID by using magnetic or “inductive” waves rather than radio waves and using very long wavelengths, Stevens said. In addition, RuBee tags can both send and receive signals, unlike RFID tags, which can only be passively read by scanners, he said. That means RuBee tags can either communicate with a base station or form a peer-to-peer network. RuBee is a packet network protocol like Wi-Fi or ZigBee, according to Stevens.
Source: http://www.pcworld.com/
