RAIN Technology
RAIN (UHF RFID) is a wireless technology that connects trillions of everyday items to the internet, enabling businesses and consumers to identify, locate, authenticate, and engage each item.
RAIN is the fastest-growing segment of the UHF RFID market with over 1 billion RAIN chips shipped every week in 2024! To date this powerful technology has connected hundreds of billions of items providing the ability to:
- Uniquely identify individual items beyond just their product type
- Identify and locate items without direct line-of-sight
- Identify many items quickly (up to 1,000 items per second)
- Read items within a range of between a few centimeters to several meters
In simple terms, RAIN is a technology that uses a reader to read and write a tagged item, manage the data, and take action. RAIN provides rich, real-time data and insights for various applications including inventory management, asset tracking, and supply chain optimization across many industry sectors.
A RAIN system is a wireless system where the tags and readers both implement the RAIN air-interface protocol and the tags are encoded utilizing controlled numbering practices either following applicable ISO standards or the GS1 EPC TDS.
RAIN Tags
- Are either attached to or embedded in items, with a noticeable trend towards embedded tags in certain market segments
- Tags store and send information
- Thousands can be identified simultaneously, and do not have to be visible
RAIN Readers
- Have antenna(s) for either short or long-range communication
- Can be small and portable, or larger and installed, or embedded in other devices
- Game-changing developments are happening in this space as the RAIN Alliance leads the whole ecosystem towards a future where RAIN readers will be available in consumer handsets, and our end users recognize the massive power of “always on” RAIN systems over other technologies
RAIN Software applications
- RAIN software systems use the data collected from RAIN tags to Identify – Locate – Authenticate – Engage with items, and create massive business value from the accurate and timely data collected
- Increasingly trending towards AI-based intelligent systems, RAIN software applications are seen proving value at “the edge,” in the cloud, and deployed in end-user environments, depending on the sector in question.