Overview
ISO/IEC 24753:2011 specifies a minimum application protocol for integrating sensors and battery monitoring with RFID tags used in item management. The standard defines common encoding and processing rules so that interrogators and applications can discover, configure, read and interpret sensor data over the RFID air interface (as defined by the ISO/IEC 18000 series). It is agnostic to tag frequency and to how sensors are attached or integrated; communication between interrogator and sensor always occurs via the RFID tag.
Key topics and technical requirements
- Sensor identification and encoding
- Rules to identify sensors, their functions and units of measurement (including use of Transducer Electronic Data Sheet - TEDS).
- Operational control
- Process rules for selecting/de-selecting sensory functions, starting/stopping monitoring, and setting sensor parameters (initial and ongoing).
- Data access and interpretation
- Standardized access to sensor data, event records and basic in-tag processing to present measurements in application-meaningful formats.
- Sensor models
- Support for full function sensors (rich TEDS, event administration, configuration records) and simple sensors (memory-mapped or ported implementations).
- Time and synchronization
- Real Time Clock (RTC) handling, timestamp encoding and time synchronization for event/observed-data consistency.
- Battery monitoring
- Encoding and processing considerations for tracking battery state as a sensor function.
- Interoperability elements
- Sensor Address Map (SAM), sensor drivers and processing rules-enabling different interrogators and systems to read sensor data without prior knowledge.
- Conformance
- Implementations claim conformance by supporting either full function sensors, simple sensors, or both.
Applications and users
ISO/IEC 24753:2011 is practical for:
- RFID system integrators and hardware manufacturers (tags, interrogators, sensor modules)
- Sensor and smart-transducer designers targeting RFID-enabled devices
- Solution architects building cold chain, asset tracking, environmental monitoring, or battery-health monitoring systems
- Software developers implementing middleware, NCAPs (Network Capable Application Processors) and backend systems that need standardized sensor metadata and event data formats
Practical use cases include temperature/humidity logging in logistics, per-item battery lifetime reporting, shock/event detection for sensitive shipments, and interoperable sensor reading across supplier equipment.
Related standards
Keywords: ISO/IEC 24753:2011, RFID sensors, sensor encoding, battery monitoring, TEDS, RFID item management, processing rules, sensor interoperability.