Improvement of RFID Accuracy for a Product Tracking System

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), as the name suggests, is technology that makes use of radio frequency electromagnetic wave to automatically identify objects. In spite of its broad applications, a RFID system might inherently produce some false and duplicate readings. Such reading data would affect the accuracy of the RFID system and might result in an unreliable performance or even complete unavailability of the system. In this paper, a reading rate-based algorithm is proposed to efficiently clean RFID data for a local business in product tracking. The method takes advantage of the proportional relationship between reading rate of a RFID tag and its distance to the reader to filter among raw data sets. Using the proposed reading rate-based algorithm, the reading accuracy of the RFID system in the local business is greatly improved.© 2013 ASME