RFID Technology

The reliability of RFID systems depends on a number of factors including RF interference, deployment environment, configuration of the readers, and placement of the readers and the tags. While RFID technology is improving rapidly, a reliable deployment of this technology is still a significant challenge thus impeding a wide-spread adoption. This paper investigates system software solutions for achieving highly reliable deployment that takes into account all the sources of inherent unreliability in the underlying RFID technology. We have developed (1) a virtual reader abstraction to capture the static and potentially error-prone nature of the physical readers and antennas; and (2) a novel path abstraction to capture the logical flow of information among the virtual readers as RFID-tagged objects move through the environment. Using these abstractions, we have designed and implemented an RFID middleware, RF2ID to organize and support queries over data streams in an efficient manner. Simulation results, using an empirical model of RFID readers, show that RF2ID is able to provide high reliability and support path-based queries at low overhead.