An accurate real-time RFID-based location system

Abstract

Modern applications frequently require the ability to locate objects in real-world environments. This has motivated the development of a number of competing approaches to object localisation, most of which target specific applications. Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) has emerged as a viable platform for localisation, but due to a number of unresolved challenges with this technology, high levels of performance and wide applicability have remained elusive. In this paper, we outline an RFID-based object localisation framework that addresses these challenges, and propose the use of Received Signal Strength (RSS) to model the behaviour of radio signals decaying over distance in an orientation-agnostic manner to simultaneously locate multiple stationary and mobile objects. The proposed localisation system can operate in a realistically radio-noisy indoor environment, enables design-space trade-offs, is highly extensible, and provides use-case-driven average accuracy as low as 0.15 metres. The proposed localisation system can quickly locate objects with or without the use of reference tags, and illustrates that RSS can be a reliable metric for RFID-based object localisation.