Passive RFID-based Indoor Positioning System, An Algorithmic Approach

Radio Frequency Identification, RFID technology having been realized of its potential usages only in recent years is now widely used in multiple disciplinary industries and applications. Major of which include SCM, logistics and retail as well as manufacturing. Another key application area of RFID is its use for localisation or positioning of items and people indoors. However, signal propagation in indoor environments is error prone and make localisation challenging. With RFID being one of the most promising technologies for indoor location awareness applications, this paper presents an algorithmic approach to locate an unknown RFID tag with the use of multiple passive RFID tags. A number of experimental results indicate a general reduction of linear positioning error mean from 3.41m to 0.61m with respect to decreasing inter-tag spacing from a maximum of 7m to a minimum of 1m, respectively. The main advantage of this technique is the reduction in number of expensive RFID readers; instead multiple inexpensive passive RFID tags placed at calculated positions provide essential data to position an unknown tag.