RLLL: Accurate Relative Localization of RFID Tags with Low Latency

Abstract

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has been widely used in many smart applications. In many scenarios, it is essential to know the ordering of a set of RFID tags. For example, to quickly detect misplaced books in smart libraries, we need to know the relative ordering of the tags attached to the books. Although several relative RFID localization algorithms have been proposed, they usually suffer from large localization latency and cannot support applications that require real-time detection of tag (product) positions like automatic manufacturing on an assembly line. Moreover, existing approaches face significant degradation in ordering accuracy when the tags are close to each other. In this paper, we propose RLLL, an accurate Relative Localization algorithm for RFID tags with Low Latency. RLLL reduces localization latency by proposing a novel geometry-based approach to identifying the V-zone in the phase reading sequence of each tag. Moreover, RLLL uses only the data in the V-zone to calculate relative positions of tags and thus avoids the negative effects of low-quality data collected when the tag is far from the antenna. Experimental results with commercial RFID devices show that RLLL achieves an ordering accuracy of higher than 0.986 with latency less than 0.8 seconds even when the tags are spaced only 7 mm from adjacent tags, in which case the state-of-the-art solutions only achieve ordering accuracy of lower than 0.8 with localization latency larger than 3 seconds.