Abstract
This paper presents a system with location functionalities for the inventory of traffic signs based on passive RFID technology. The proposed system simplifies the current video-based techniques, whose requirements regarding visibility are difficult to meet in some scenarios, such as dense urban areas. In addition, the system can be easily extended to consider any other street facilities, such as dumpsters or traffic lights. Furthermore, the system can perform the inventory process at night and at a vehicle’s usual speed, thus avoiding interfering with the normal traffic flow of the road. Moreover, the proposed system exploits the benefits of the passive RFID technologies over active RFID, which are typically employed on inventory and vehicular routing applications. Since the performance of passive RFID is not obvious for the required distance ranges on these in-motion scenarios, this paper, as its main contribution, addresses the problem in two different ways, on the one hand theoretically, presenting a radio wave propagation model at theoretical and simulation level for these scenarios; and on the other hand experimentally, comparing passive and active RFID alternatives regarding costs, power consumption, distance ranges, collision problems, and ease of reconfiguration. Finally, the performance of the proposed on-board system is experimentally validated, testing its capabilities for inventory purposes.
Highlights
Road maintenance companies keep a record of the location and date of installation of all the traffic signs placed on the roadways, which helps to determine which of them have to be replaced for age reasons, as well as to plan the installation of new traffic sign infrastructure
In the prototype that we have developed, electronic product code (EPC) identifiers received by the radio-frequency identification (RFID) reader are sent to an external computer, time-stamped, and stored on a detecting tags placed on traffic signs installed on the opposite side of the road or at the back of the signs left behind by the vehicle
In the prototype that we have developed, electronic product code (EPC) identifiers received by the RFID reader are sent to an external computer, time-stamped, and stored on a database
Summary
Road maintenance companies keep a record of the location and date of installation of all the traffic signs placed on the roadways, which helps to determine which of them have to be replaced for age reasons, as well as to plan the installation of new traffic sign infrastructure. The effective aperture of a receiving antenna—i.e., the area over which the antenna gathers the energy of the incoming electromagnetic waves—is shown in specialized texts [39] to be aeff = gR λ2 /4π (m2 ), where gR is the gain of the antenna and λ (m) is the wavelength of the wave It holds that the mean power pR delivered to the receiving antenna is the product of the Poynting vector at the antenna by its effective area aeff. For a free-space propagation scenario, the Poynting vector at a distance r (m) from a transmitter can be calculated, for a transmission power pT (W), as φ = pT gT /(4πr2 ), where gT is the gain of the transmitter antenna in the direction of the receiver By equating both expressions for φ, we obtain that [39] p 30p T gT erms = [V/m].
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