RFID orders continue to surge, reports E-Week, with the United States leading the way. It’s closely followed by the United Kingdom, China and Japan, with RFID sales outpacing the economy.

Global sales of RFID technology are expected to grow 5 percent to $5.56 billion in 2009, according to IDTechEx, the surge in sales will be accomplished despite the world’s largest RFID project — the $6 billion China National ID card scheme — being completed a year earlier.

The United States heads the list of RFID projects, including a $428 million contract issued by the U.S. Army for the RFID III program. Currently, RFID tags are attached to approximately 125,000 shipments of U.S. military supplies each week.

Another major contract was Transcore’s $63 million deal with Florida for an electronic toll system. In other significant RFID deals, CSC and IBM landed an order for $570 million to upgrade the United Kingdom’s e-passport applications and enrollment system.

The Chinese are putting RFID throughout its factories and supply chain in order to underpin the nation’s manufacturing.

Hong Kong is particularly active in RFID while Japan continues to buy more than 90 percent of the world’s RFID-enabled mobile phones. They can be used to buy access to public transport as well as goods in many retail shops.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) — the so-called third generation active RFID — are being offered by a large number of companies. WSN, otherwise known as Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN) will be used to automatically monitor building occupancy and climate control, oil and gas pumping, forest fires, avalanches and other uses over wide areas in the coming years using technology like ZigBee a low-ppower, mesh-networking specification.