Management of the products on display shelves using advanced electronic tags equipped with ad hoc network communication capability

Abstract

Advanced IC tags equipped with ad hoc network communication capability are used for product location management to flexibly deal with frequent changes in product layout on display shelves as is often the case in rental shops. A tag is attached to each product. It manages product and location information. The paper proposes a method in which tags communicate with each other to updating product location information autonomously. It also proposes a method of managing and searching for product information (identification of the shelf on which a given product is located, and product attributes) held by each tag using a distributed hash table. The proposed methods have been implemented on a MANET emulator, and the performance of the methods, such as the probability of successful location information update, and search time, has been evaluated. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.