RFID Based Student Attendance and Monitoring System

RFID Based Student Attendance and Monitoring System Ashwin K. 1, Aswin Perumal A. 2, Krishnakumar S. 3, Maheshwari M. 4 U.G. Scholar, Department of CSE, Anand Institute of Higher Technology, Kalasalingam Nagar, OMR, Kazhipattur, [1], [2], [3] Chennai, Tamilnadu, India Assistant Professor, Department of CSE, Anand Institute of Higher Technology, Kalasalingam Nagar, OMR, Kazhipattur, Chennai, Tamilnadu, India [4] ABSTRACT:Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) have been used in number of applications for the past few decades and have been successfully applied to different areas. The academic office is still lack of one effectual methodology to collect 100% student s actual attendance. The aim is to solve the student attendance and monitoring problem in school, colleges and universities using RFID technology. In the proposed system, the students will be identified by placing passive tag in the student s ID card. This system will take care of the attendance while he/she enters the classroom and if the student moves out of the class and enters some other class room or any other location within the campus, a message which indicates the current location of that student will be sent to the concerned staffs. The RFID reader can be connected to a computer through a RS232 cable and the attendance can be recorded directly and by using the real time clock capability of the system the attendance can be noted along with the in-time and outtime of every student. KEYWORDS: RFID; IoT; RS232; Passive Tag. I. INTRODUCTION The Internet of Things (IoT) technology has obtained greater heights in last few years. IoT refers to the interconnection of uniquely identifiable embedded computing-like devices within the existing infrastructure. The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, sensors, actuators, and mobile phones are often seen as prerequisites for the IoT. IoT is capable of connecting variety of physical objects, through unique addressing schemes, to an internet-like structure, which enables the object to interact and cooperate with each other to reach common goals. A RFID system consists of an RFID reader and multiple RFID tags. In a typical working of an RFID system, the reader sends out an identification request to the tags, and the tags reply with the tag information. If multiple tags reply simultaneously, tag collision occurs and this leads to the unsuccessful identification of all the tags. Therefore, anticollision protocols are employed to improve the identification rate of RFID tags. The collision is generally avoided using the adaptive binary tree and slotted ALOHA techniques. There are two major categories of RFID tags namely active and passive tags. Passive RFID tags only backscatter magnetic or electromagnetic waves coming from the RFID reader. That is the only way a passive RFID tag can communicate with the reader. In other words, they do not have any RF emitters on board so they cannot create their own RF signals. Passive tags use the incoming signal from the interrogator to supply the embedded chip. Active tags have their own RF emitter on board. They can either send RF signals to the interrogator as they receive a comprehensive command or function without any external command. As creating an RF signal requires a lot of energy, active tags quite often have an internal power supply. Apart from these two types of RFID tags there are several other types called as Semi-RFID and RFID SAW tags. Semi RFID tags are also called as Battery assisted passive (BAP) tags have an embedded battery to supply internal Copyright @ IJIRCCE www.ijircce.com 305

circuitry or connected sensors or actuators. This power source is not used to create any RF signal as the tag is always passive. RFID SAW tags (Surface Acoustic Wave) do not have integrated circuits. They are read-only transponders and do not include embedded energy. The RFID readers are also classified based on the presence of power supply. Active readers have their own power supply and they can read both active and passive tags within its range. But passive readers can read only active tags. The readers and tags can also be classified based on their operating frequencies and the reader s range. The readers operating at 120 150 khz are called Low Frequency readers (LF) and they have range of about 10cm, the readers operating at 13.56 MHz are called High Frequency readers (HF) and they have range of about 10cm-1m, the readers operating at 433 MHz are called Ultra High Frequency readers (UHF) and they have range of about 1m-100m. Among the wide variety of RFID readers and tags one has to be careful while selecting the right type of readers and tags based on their application. In the proposed system, the idea is to maintain the attendance of the students when they enters the classroom which would require a UHF reader and passive tags. But in order to implement the proposed system using UHF reader it will be expensive. Therefore a prototype of the proposed system is implemented using a LF reader and passive RFID tags so that the students have to show their id cards in front of the reader as the range of detection of a LF reader is less than 10cm. A. Roll Call System II. EXISTING SYSTEM Roll call system is the method used to take attendance in a majority of institutions since it is the most inexpensive method for managing the attendance. In this system the student s name are called out to determine their absence. Though this method is inexpensive it requires much time to record the attendance and there are no techniques to monitor a student s location in this method. B. Biometrics System Biometrics involves the use of unique physical characteristics of each human being like fingerprints, retina and voice for the purpose of identification and authorization. Several organizations rely on biometrics for maintaining the attendance but the major drawback of using biometrics is that the identification rate is not same all the time. It has been known that the fingerprints of the people working in chemical industries gets damaged over time, people who suffer from diabetes are expected to have diabetic retinopathy which is the damage caused to retina due to diabetes and people s voice may differ with age or if they have flu or throat infection. Under these circumstances identification rate of the biometrics system will be very less. Fig. 1. Biometric based attendance system C. Proximity Based Attendance System The proximity based attendance system uses proximity cards which look similar to a RFID card, the only difference is that if a RFID tag uses a battery as its power source then its reading range can be boosted up to 300 feet. Also RFID tags can contain more information than a proximity card and no techniques are available to locate people using proximity system. Copyright @ IJIRCCE www.ijircce.com 306

III. PROPOSED SYSTEM The actual idea proposed in this paper is to record the attendance when the students enters the classroom itself without the need to show their id cards in front of the reader. But in order to implement the proposed system several UHF readers must be placed in every classroom which would be expensive. So a prototype of the proposed system is being implemented using a LF RFID reader and passive tags, in which the student has to show their id cards in front of the RFID reader. The idea is to record the attendance of the students and maintaining the attendance report automatically. A. Active Reader and Passive tag Active readers have their own power supply and they can read both active and passive tags within its range. The operating frequency of the readers and tags used in this system is 125KHZ and the range of detection is less than 10cm. Passive RFID tags do not have internal power source. It consists only of a microchip and an antenna. The microchip and the antenna are together called as an RFID inlay, shown in Fig 4. Passive tags do not have any internal emitters and the chip gets powered up only when it is within the interrogator s range. Once the tag s chipbecomes powered, it transmits a signal. The change in the electromagnetic wave is detected by the reader s antenna which interprets the information to identify the embedded tag value. B. Adaptive Binary Tree & Slotted ALOHA While using UHF RFID readers a problem will occur when two students enter the class room at the same time because collision occurs at the RFID reader. To avoid this collision, techniques like slotted ALOHA or Adaptive Binary Tree are used for singularization of the RFID tags. Slotted ALOHA uses discrete time slots to send data. If a packet arrives while another packet is being sent then the transmission of the new packet will be delayed until the beginning of the next slot. So, a station can send only at the beginning of next timeslot, and thus collisions are avoided. Fig. 2. Architecture of RFID based student attendance and monitoring system Copyright @ IJIRCCE www.ijircce.com 307

C. Location Tracking The location of the students are tracked by placing the RFID readers in front of all the classrooms and any other places where the student is expected to go. When a student s tag is read by a RFID reader where he/she is not supposed to be at that moment according to the schedule then the student s location is detected by using the IP address of the system from which the RFID tag value is obtained and the location information is sent to the staff in-charge and the head of the department. D. RS232 To USB Interfacing The RFID reader module comes with a RS232 serial port in it, but it has to be connected to a computer through the USB interface. So a RS232 to USB adapter cable is required for this purpose. Also for the proper functioning of the adapter cable, one has to install the necessary driver software on the computer to which the RFID reader is going to be connected. After installing the driver software, we can get the tag values through the respective COM port of the USB slot of that PC. A. Automated Attendance System IV. IMPLEMENTATION The automation of the attendance is achieved through the passive tag and active RFID readers. The system is designed in a way that each student is given a unique RFID passive tag which is embedded within every ID card. When a student passes through the entrance of a classroom his/her tag value will be identified by the RFID reader. The value sensed will be sent to a computer through the RS232 interface. This computer will be having the database which consists of all the student s register number and their respective tag values. It also contains the time table of the class in which the RFID reader is placed. As the student enters the class, their tag values will be identified and it is checked with the database to determine whether he belongs to that class. If he belongs to that class then attendance for that hour according to the time table will be marked present for that respective student in the database. In case of emergency if a student leaves the class then the student will be given a grace time of 5minutes within which the student has to return to the class. If the student is not returning in 5minutes then absent will be marked for that student in the database.simultaneous entry of students can lead to multiple reads at the same time which will lead to collisions in the RFID reader. This may cause problems during the updation of the database.so to avoid these kind of errors, slotted ALOHA or Adaptive Binary Tree techniques can be used. These techniques singularize the RFID tags. Singularization is the process of selecting a particular tag present in the range using RFID protocol using a unique ID (UID). This anti-collision protocol used to track individual tags even if there is a tag payload. Slotted ALOHA uses discrete time slots to send data. If a packet arrives while another packet is being sent then the transmission of the new packet will be delayed until the beginning of the next slot. So, a station can send only at the beginning of next time slot thus collisions are reduced. Copyright @ IJIRCCE www.ijircce.com 308

B. Student Monitoring System Fig. 3. Block diagram of RFID based student attendance and monitoring system As the automated student attendance systems mark the attendance for the students who are present inside the classroom, the proposed system also tries to find the geo position of the student who is not inside the classroom at that moment of time. Geo fencing technique can be used to determine the geo position of the students. Geo-fencing refers to a tool which is used to establish a virtual perimeter or barrier around a physical geographical area using Global Positioning System (GPS) or RFID.Geo Fencing tools monitor continuously and when the locationaware device of location base service user enter or exits an established geo-fenced area the device receives a generated notification. The administrators are alerted with a change of status for a device. These alerts can be of any form like text message, mail, call notification etc. Geo positions of the students can be monitored only when a student enters or exits the fenced area with a position enabled device such as a smartphone or similar devices. So having an electronic device inside college campus may lead to overriding of college protocols. So to overcome this situation, RFID technology is used. In order to monitor the student s position active RFID readers are placed at the entrance of important places like classrooms, canteens, library etc. When a student crosses one of these readers, the reader senses the tag value and determines whether the student belongs to that corresponding class or not. If yes, it will be handled by the automated attendance system, If not, then the location is sensed by using the IP address of the computer which is connected to the RFID reader in that location. The system then sends the IP address along with the student s register number to the Head of The Department or the staff in-charge. This computer will have a database where every IP is mapped to a location. From this database the location of the student is discovered and is displayed as a message on their screen. Copyright @ IJIRCCE www.ijircce.com 309

V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE ENHANCEMENT In this paper, the constraints present in existing version of attendance maintenance and the student monitoring were discussed. The proposed system provides an automated system to overcome the above difficulties in the old and existing system and the proposed system is designed in a way such that it will reduce the user load in a maximum way. And also the system tries to solve the wrong attendance and fake attendances. In the future, this work can be extended over the cloud so that all the departments under the same college can be interconnected and can be managed by a centralized system and also the attendance can be seen by the parents from their home. Moreover higher versions of the RFID readers and tags can be used to read the data so that the system is more fast and reliable. Another interesting topic is to develop tag grouping technology in RFID anti-collision protocols for the tags. REFERENCES [1] Yeong-Lin Lai and Jay Cheng, A Cloud-Storage RFID Location Tracking System, Department of Mechatronics Engineering, National Changhua University of Education, vol. 50, no. 7, July 2014. [2] Y.-L. Lai and C.-C. Chen, An intelligent RFID fall notification system, Int. J. Innovative Computing, Inf. Control, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 3133 3145, Jun. 2011. [3] Y.-L. Lai and J. Cheng, A 2.45-GHz RFID wireless-sensor-network location tracking system, in Proc. 17th IEEE Int. Symp. Consum. Electron.,Hsinchu, Taiwan, Jun. 2013, pp. 133 134. [4] Y.-L. Lai and J. Cheng, An efficient RFID monitoring system for logistics, in Proc. Asia Pacific Int. Conf. RFID, Taipei, Taiwan, Dec. 2010. [5] Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, "Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)," postnote July 2004 Number 225. [6] RFID Journal, http://www.rfidjournal.com/fagi16. visited on March 15, 2010. [7] Gareth R.T. White et ai., "A Comparison of Barcoding and RFID Technologies in Practice," Journal of Information, Information Technology, and Organizations, Volume 2, 2007. [8] A. Kassem (IEEE Member), M. Hamad (IEEE Member), Z. Chalhoub, and S. EI Dahdaah, An RFID Attendance and Monitoring System for University Applications. [9] Grant Hornback, Alex Babu, BobbyMartin, Ben Zoghi, MadhavPappu, and RohitSinghal, Automatic Attendance System Journal, fromrfidsensnet Lab; 2001. [10] Dargan, Gaurav; Johnson,Brian; Panchalingam, Mukunthan; Stratis, Chris The Use of Radio Frequency Identification as a Replacement for Traditional Barcoding. 2004. [11] T.S. Lim, S.C. Sim and M.M. Mansor, RFID Based Attendance System, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, (ISIEA 2009), October 4-6, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Copyright @ IJIRCCE www.ijircce.com 310