Title: Approaches to fast sequential inventory and path following in RFID-enriched environments

Authors: Arne Bosien; Volker Turau; Franco Zambonelli

Addresses: Institute of Telematics, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany. ' Institute of Telematics, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany. ' Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell’Ingegneria, Universitá di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Via Amendola 2, Pad. Morselli, 42122 Reggio Emilia, Italy

Abstract: Although RFID is mostly used for ticketing, e-passports and supply chain management applications, the technology is also suitable for transponder based navigation systems. There it can be applied to leave a virtual trace on writeable RFID tags. These applications use RFID in a different way, because the tags are stationary and related to each other, since each tag of the path points to the following one. This offers the possibility to develop more efficient algorithms for their detection. In this paper, we suggest to store the identifying masks of subsequent tag IDs on the tags. The approach can easily be used with query-tree anti-collision methods. We examine the requirements for such an approach and describe a concrete algorithm, which is simulated and compared with different anti-collision algorithms.

Keywords: RFID tags; radio frequency identification; sequential inventory; anti-collision algorithms; pheromones; ants; path following; transponder based navigation; query trees; ISO-15693; mask storing; virtual trace; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRFITA.2012.044649

International Journal of Radio Frequency Identification Technology and Applications, 2012 Vol.4 No.1, pp.28 - 48

Received: 02 Nov 2010
Accepted: 30 Jun 2011
Published online: 20 Dec 2014 *