Redundant reader elimination approaches for RFID networks

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, due to recent technological advances, have been used for various advantages in industries like production facilities, supply chain management etc. However, sometimes this implies a dense deployment of readers to cover the working area. Without optimizing reader's location and number, many of them will be redundant, reducing the efficiency of the whole RFID system. There are many algorithms proposed by researchers to solve redundant reader problem, but all the algorithms are based on omni-directional reader antenna pattern, which is not practical. Therefore, the approach proposed in this paper was first applied to RFID readers using omni-directional antenna and thus, extended to directional reader antennas. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach for omni-directional reader antenna outperforms other well-known techniques like Redundant Reader Elimination (RRE) algorithm, Layered Elimination Optimization (LEO) and LEO+RRE while preserving the coverage ratio quite close to those obtained by RRE, LEO and LEO+RRE. Then, we extended the concept to real directional reader antenna pattern using genetic algorithm to optimize the antenna beam to eliminate redundant readers. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.