INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the study

Student Attendance Management System (SAMS) is the easiest technique to assist the
school and the lecturer for the time-consuming process in recording student
attendance. The foremost means of trailing student attendance within the lecture room
is by imposing the scholars to manually sign the attendance sheet, which is generally
surpassed around the lecture room while the lecturer is conducting the lecture. As an
example, lecturers with an out-sized class may find the hassle of getting the
attendance sheet being passed around the class and therefore the manual signing of
attendance by students are burdensome and presumably distract them from teaching
and getting full attention from the scholars. Besides, as the attendance sheet is been
passed around the lecture room, a scholar might accidentally or purposely sign
another scholar's name. The primary case results in a student missing out their name,
while it latter results in a false attendance record. Another issue of getting the
attendance record in a hard copy form is that a lecturer may lose the attendance sheet.
In terms of analysing the attendance, the lecturer needs to perform the manual
computation to get the scholars’ attendance percentage, which normally consume tons
of time.

RFID (Radio frequency identification) is a new era of technology that comes with
the usage of electrostatic or electromagnetic coupling within the radio frequency part
of the electromagnetic spectrum to uniquely discover or identify an object. RFID is a
powerful tool in helping to manage student‘s attendance all through the working
school day and also enhance lecture room security. RFID technology has been
implemented to solve troubles where it is vital to automatically record the movements
and locations of students in a lecture room of the school/college environment. RFID,
which is an automatic identification technology used for retrieving from or storing
Information directly to RFID Tags without any physical contact.
Recent advancements in chip manufacturing technology are making RFID practical
for new applications and settings, particularly consumer item level tagging. These
advancements have the potential to revolutionize supply-chain management,
inventory control, and logistics. At its most basic, RFID systems consist of small
transponders, or tags, attached to physical objects. RFID tags may soon become the
most pervasive microchip in history. An RFID system primarily comprises
of RFID Tags, RFID Reader, and Middleware. RFID Tags are uniquely and
universally identified by an identification sequence, governed by the rubrics of EPC
global Tag Data Standard. A tag can either be passively activated by an RFID reader
or it can actively transmit RF signals to the reader. When wirelessly interrogated
by RFID transceivers, or readers, tags respond with some identifying information that
may be associated with arbitrary data records. Thus, RFID systems are one type of
automatic identification system, similar to optical bar codes.
There are many kinds of RFID systems used in different applications and settings.
These systems have different power sources, operating frequencies, and
functionalities. The properties and regulatory restrictions of a particular RFID system
will determine its manufacturing costs, physical specifications, and performance.
Some of the most familiar RFID applications are item-level tagging with electronic
product codes, proximity cards for physical access control, and contact-less payment
systems. Many more applications will become economical in the coming years.
While RFID adoption yields many efficiency benefits, it still faces several hurdles.
Besides the typical implementation challenges faced in any information technology
system and economic barriers, there are major concerns over security and privacy in
RFID systems.