Probable causes of RFID tag read unreliability in supermarkets and proposed solutions

RFID is well known technology with widespread applications in diverse fields by now, supply chain management and retailing industries are in forefront of RFID adoption on large scale. RFID tags attached to objects in supermarkets offer many advantages over the existing barcode technology including one trace speedy billing process and in overall automated store management. Though RFID adoption in supermarkets greatly eases overall management and provides many opportunities for growth of the business, this technology has to overcome many challenges to become fully reliable. Tag read miss is one of the major problems to the RFID technology itself. We explored here this issue of tag read unreliability related to the specific application of RFID in Supermarket. Tag read miss in supermarket can lead to mismanagement and even economic loss to the company. In this paper we have categorised the probable causes of tag read miss into intentional and unintentional causes and proposed solutions to overcome these problems. Intentional causes include malfunctioning of the normal operation of RFID system by attacker to take unethical benefit. RFID technology limitations to read tags successfully are covered in unintentional causes.