Matching mother and calf reindeer using wireless sensor networks

The problem of matching newborn reindeer calves to their mothers, and hence to their owners, so that they are given proper identification tags, after the reindeers are gathered from the wild in September each year, is a painstaking task which is being undertaken using manpower which is very costly and time consuming, at the same time the manual techniques used are very stressful for the animals and farmers alike. In this paper, a method is proposed using wireless sensor networks based on WiFi enabled active RFID tags. It is proposed to hang WiFi enabled RFID tags to the necks of the calf and mother reindeers on a temporary basis, a procedure which should not consume much time nor cause stress on the animals, and to track the location of those tags using the WiFi network. Localization algorithms developed to monitor the location of the tags and to determine the correlation between any pairs of tags which indicate mother and her calf. A full description of the technology is presented together with description of well-known localization techniques. It is hoped that this paper will pave the way for the use of wireless sensor networks for the purpose of identification of semi-wild animals.