**1. Introduction**

In the current age of rapid technological progress and development, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has found many applications in various areas such as supply chain, warehouse, and retail store management. Alike mobile communications, the high data performance and compact profile are becoming obvious expectations of the users of handheld RFID devices. In this regard, directional antennas have a bright prospect for a more user friendly experience even in the rugged environments.

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of RFID technology concerning the pros‐ pects of directional especially forward directional antennas and propagation for multiband operation. The technical considerations of directional antenna parameters are also discussed in details in order to provide a complete realization of the parameters in pragmatic approach to the directional antenna designing process, which primarily in‐ cludes scattering parameters and radiation characteristics. The antenna literature is also critically overviewed to identify the possible solutions of the directional antennas to uti‐ lize in single and multi-band handheld RFID reader operation. However, it has been seen that these techniques can be combined to enhance the directional antennas with wider bandwidths and higher gain. Last but not least, the possibilities of forward-direc‐ tional antennas which spectacularly use the surface wave for the radiation will be ex‐ plored, and the difference with the conventional directional antennas with them will be discussed.

properly cited.

© 2013 Toaha Mobashsher and W. Aldhaheri; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is © 2013 Toaha Mobashsher and W. Aldhaheri; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
