Investigation of Indoor Location Sensing via RFID Reader Network Utilizing Grid Covering Algorithm

One of the biggest challenges in RFID (radio frequency identification) large scale deployment, such as in warehouse RFID deployment, is the positioning of RFID reader antennas to efficiently locate all the tagged objects distributed at RFID reader environment. This paper has investigated a novel location sensing system based on geometric grid covering algorithm that can use any passive or active RFID standard for positioning or tracking objects inside buildings. This study involves design of RFID reader antenna network which focuses on placing the reader antennas on a grid to cover all the tags distributed at two dimensional planes and position calculation using statistical averages algorithm. The statistical averages algorithm simply computes the location coordinates of the tagged object by statistical average of the reader antenna’s location. The proposed grid of reader antennas can assist in minimizing the actual number of reader antennas required for RFID large scale deployment. The proposed prototype system is a simpler positioning system which presents the solution of placement pattern of RFID reader antennas, gives less complicated mathematical calculation, and is able to provide a high degree of accuracy. The obtained results show that the proposed location sensing system can achieve better positioning accuracy as compared to existing positioning system and in some cases accuracy improvement of about 50% can be reached.