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EPC UHF Gen2 Air Interface Protocol

GS1's EPC "Gen2" air interface protocol, first published by EPCglobal in 2004, defines the physical and logical requirements for an RFID system of interrogators and passive tags, operating in the 860 MHz - 930 MHz UHF range. Over the past decades, EPC Gen2 has established itself as the standard for UHF passive RFID (aka RAIN RFID) implementations across multiple sectors and is at the heart of more and more RFID implementations.

2013 saw the publication of Gen2v2 which incorporated several enhancements requested by the GS1 community to support their RFID rollouts and address issues like data security and privacy protection.

The most recent update, Gen2v3, has been developed in response to the new challenges posed by the growing number of RFID applications. Gen2v3 provides additional features to Gen2v2 like:

  • new inventory commands that include tag selection. This will allow to focus on tags of interest like those that carry specific GS1 identifiers.
  • reduced interferences with « fringe » tags. Interrogators will be able to modulate the radiated field strength to ensure that tags have enough power to be properly inventoried.
  • new command that simplifies capture of data encoded in User and TID memory banks. This new command will instruct the tag to backscatter what is encoded, nothing more, nothing less.
  • introduction of logical operators (greater than, lower than, equal or not equal to) in tag selection criteria. This will allow to select tags within a range of values. This can be of particular interest when tags carry a date value.
  • simplified implementation of crypto tags.

Nothing has been deprecated. Gen2v3 includes all the features defined in Gen2v2.

Previous versions of this standard

Review all previous versions of this standard here

Conformance Requirements

Gen2 v 2.0 Conformance Requirements

Gen2 v 1.2.0 Conformance Requirements

Gen2 v 1.1.0 Conformance Requirements

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