IP-based RFID Location System

Abstract

The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) landscape has been radically changing since decades. It has been widely deployed by commercial and industrial organizations as well as government agencies with a wide range of applications. The RFID technology makes it possible to identify an object, to track it and learn its characteristics remotely, thanks to a label emitting radio waves, integrated or attached to the object. The RFID technology enables reading of labels even without direct line of sight and can pass through thin layers of material (paint, snow, etc.). In the last few years, the RFID systems have evolved significantly in terms of technology and cost, enabling the RFID systems to stand out as the reference identification technology in numerous fields of applications such as asset tracking, logistics and supply chain management, animal tracking, healthcare, warehouse management, manufacturing engineering, automotive, contactless payments, etc. and mandated by industry giants (e.g. Wall-Mart, Target, Tesco and Albertson , etc.) and various government agencies (e.g. U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Homeland security, etc.). One of the main advantages of the RFID technology is to provide a low cost and easy to install indoor location system compared to other positioning systems, such as Global Positioning System (GPS), Wi-Fi, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), Infrared (IR), and sensor based systems, etc. A number of location sensing systems based on RFID technology have been proposed for indoor location services. SpotON [high] supports indoor location service using RFID technology based on radio signal strength analysis. LANMARC [ni] aims at increasing the accuracy in determining the RFID tag location and economizing the deployment cost of the system. To increase the accuracy, the system defines extra fixed location reference tags to help location calibration. In addition, an algorithm which reflects the relations of signal strengths by power level is developed in order to compute accurately the physical distance between the objects and the reader. FLEXOR [sue] is an improvement of LANDMARC to reduce the computational overhead in determining the location of the objects. The system divides the location area into cells which reduce the information used for localization calculation and decreases the computation load for the localization service. FERRET [liu] allows not only locating the RFID tagged objects, but also displaying the objects. The system uses an RFID reader embedded in a camera. FERRET uses also the algorithm which reflects the relations of signal strengths by power level to locate the objects. When the object is