Location information dissemination scheme for RFID-based distributed localization systems

The availability of location information is essential for context- and location-aware services, which are typically provided by a large number of applications. RFID systems are extensively utilized to provide localization service typically through a centralized and coordinated approach. In this paper, we propose a distributed location information dissemination scheme using heterogeneous uncoordinated mobile RFID readers with the support of inexpensive "memory spots". In the proposed scheme, mobile RFID readers localize passive RFID-tagged objects and leverage the available memory spots in a given smart environment to disseminate location information. Mobile RFID readers use such memory spots to store tag locations and queries enabling exchange location information without the need for direct communication among each other. We study the behavior of the proposed scheme and compare its performance with a typical pull dissemination strategy through extensive simulations using ns-3. Our results indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms the typical pull dissemination strategy in terms of localization delay and average overhead under different dynamicity settings.