This document defines the air interface for radio frequency identification (RFID) devices operating in the 2,45 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band used in item management applications. This document provides a common technical specification for RFID devices that can be used by ISO committees developing RFID application standards. This document is intended to allow for compatibility and to encourage inter-operability of products for the growing RFID market in the international marketplace. This document defines the forward and return link parameters for technical attributes including, but not limited to, operating frequency, operating channel accuracy, occupied channel bandwidth, maximum equivalent isotropically radiated power (EIRP), spurious emissions, modulation, duty cycle, data coding, bit rate, bit rate accuracy, bit transmission order, and where appropriate, operating channels, frequency hop rate, hop sequence, spreading sequence, and chip rate. This document further defines the communications protocol used in the air interface.

This document contains four modes. Mode 1 is an interrogator talks first with passive tag. Mode 2 is a tag talks first with battery-assisted passive tag. Mode 3 is a globally available, ubiquitous network supporting (but not limited to) the logistics and transportation industry; agnostic to any device, commercial or otherwise, requiring global availability. Mode 4 is a configurable data rate active RFID system. It provides the functions of long range objects identification and environmental sense, and it is intended to realize the low cost device and low power consumption, long range identification, fast and reliable tags access. The detailed technical differences between the modes are shown in the parameter tables.