Redundant reader elimination for directional antenna in RFID systems

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, due to recent technological advances, have been used for various advantages in industries like production facilities, supply chain management etc. However, this can require a dense deployment of readers to cover the working area. Without optimizing reader's location and number, many of them can be redundant, reducing the efficiency of the whole RFID system. There are many algorithms proposed by researchers to solve redundant reader problem, but all these algorithms are based on omni-directional reader antenna patterns, which is not practical. In this paper we present an algorithm for redundant reader elimination for directional antenna. It uses a radio propagation model and also accounts for loss due to multipath fading to model communication between a reader and a tag. The efficiency of the proposed approach was demonstrated while preserving the tag coverage.