A Combinatorial Methodology for RFID Benchmarking

With recent advances in wireless technologies, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) becomes an important enabling technology for logistics and supply chain management systems and beyond. Effective deployment of these systems requires careful selection and seamless integration of RFID components such as tags, readers, middleware and standards. The frequent releases of new RFID components obsolete past experiences quickly and thus impose great challenges to the selection and integration process. Systematic classification and accurate comparison of their features and relative performance are desirable. To serve these purposes, benchmarking is a promising measure. Nevertheless, how can RFID components be reliably benchmarked? RFID benchmarking should address at least two technical challenges. First, the performance of RFID components are rarely determined by a single factor. Second, the measurements are subject to natural environmental noises. In this paper, we propose a combinatorial benchmarking methodology to help address these two challenges.