## 1 Introduction  
Since communication with products must take place in a simple, economically convenient way at all times and throughout the production and laboring process, automatic identification systems are an important part of the entire production chain [1]. By exploiting recent technological developments, it is possible to overcome or prevent problems and dysfunctions that are economically onerous to production costs, such as verification of the correct composition of the assembled pieces, checking the processing times and methods, strengthening the safety of workers, monitoring the state of health of the machines in terms of energy-saving [2], and optimizing maintenance cycles [3]. Also, the improvement of the yield and the qualitative profile of the manufactured product is one of the reasons supporting production traceability [4]. Having a continuous and truthful perception of the various departments and the progress of every single piece, providing the information in real time not only to the production process, but also to a correct and punctual order fulfilment and, therefore, customer satisfaction, is part of a lean approach to production, especially in the textile and agri-food sector [5]. The possibility of identifying, selecting, and managing the resulting data is fundamental in order to make the flow of information coherent and truly usable, which is one of the critical resources of manufacturing [6]. In this scenario, one of the valuable and most diffused technologies that are employed to enhance the production chain is the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system. RFID technology is an automated identification system mainly based on the RF microwave transmission and is considered the natural evolution of traditional identification systems, such as bar codes, magnetic cards, and smart cards. Although its theory of operation was conceived with the beginning of radio frequency communications era, the usage of RFID systems is nowadays constantly increasing, thanks to the continuous technological advances that enabled such devices to be one of the key parts for a novel human scenario of smart communication, like the recent IoT (Internet of Things) applications. Broadly speaking, RFID technology includes a vast set of microdevices that are used to identify various product categories, such as electronic toll collection systems, labels implanted in animals for their identification, access control--tickets and cards--for which the proximity reading is used without physical or visual contact, and the centralized locking systems for motor vehicles. The RFID TAGs are also integrated into clothing tags or shoes, and an Italian company has recently patented a stopper for wine bottles [7]. RFID functions are also integrated into passports, health cards, and even banknotes. In Italy, since the end of October 2006, passports have been issued with an integrated RFID compliant with the ISO 14,443 Smart Card standard [8]. The decree of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs of 29 November 2005 provides that in the TAG memory of at least 64 Kb, information concerning the passport and the holder, as well as the computer codes for protection and inalterability, even the photographic image of the face and the fingerprints of the index finger of each hand, should be stored. One class of applications in which the use of RFID is becoming pervasive is that related to the supply chain of goods [9; 10]. In this regard, since 2005, the European Parliament has launched legislation that makes the traceability of assets along the distribution chain mandatory. This has favored the development of RFIDs that lend themselves much better than traditional barcodes to convey information about objects and transfer them to the systems that interrogate them. In this sense, RFIDs are used in the distribution chain mainly as a support for the universal identifier codes of EPC (Electronic Product Code) objects. Recently, the use of RFID technology in the area of recycling also became a reality [11].