Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2016

Abstract

Many object localization applications need the relative locations of a set of objects as oppose to their absolute locations. Although many schemes for object localization using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have been proposed, they mostly focus on absolute object localization and are not suitable for relative object localization because of large error margins and the special hardware that they require. In this paper, we propose an approach called spatial-temporal phase profiling (STPP) to RFID-based relative object localization. The basic idea of STPP is that by moving a reader over a set of tags during which the reader continuously interrogating the tags, for each tag, the reader obtains a sequence of RF phase values, which we call a phase profile, from the tag's responses over time. By analyzing the spatial-temporal dynamics in the phase profiles, STPP can calculate the spatial ordering among the tags. In comparison with prior absolute object localization schemes, STPP requires neither dedicated infrastructure nor special hardware. We implemented STPP and evaluated its performance in two real-world applications: locating misplaced books in a library and determining the baggage order in an airport. The experimental results show that STPP achieves about 84% ordering accuracy for misplaced books and 95% ordering accuracy for baggage handling. We further leverage the controllable reader antenna and upgrade STPP to infer the spacing between each pair of tags. The result shows that STPP could achieve promising performance on distance ranging.

Keywords

Communication technology, wireless communication, wireless networks

Discipline

Communication Technology and New Media | Digital Communications and Networking | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

Volume

25

Issue

1

First Page

596

Last Page

609

ISSN

1063-6692

Identifier

10.1109/TNET.2016.2590996

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) / Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2016.2590996

Download

Share

COinS