An Investigation into the Reachability of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technologies in Adverse Conditions

The use of location tracking technology can be applied to industry to improve many areas such as security, safety and the supply chain. The main reason that location tracking systems have not be applied across many applications is due to the number of limitations that restrict the technology. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is mainly used in close proximity identification such as entering a building using an RFID enabled swipe card. The technology uses readers and tags to communicate data. Active RFID and passive RFID tags can be used for tracking goods or people within indoor or outdoor environments. The accuracy varies with each system and there are many factors which influence the accuracy such as electromagnetic interference. This paper investigates the accuracy of one RFID indoor tracking system. We develop a location tracking system for the Northern Ireland fire service to test the RFID tracking in a real world scenario.