Time-Efficient RFID-Based Stocktaking with a Coarse-Grained Inventory List

摘要

RFID-based stocktaking uses RFID technology to verify the presence of objects in a region e.g., a warehouse or a library. The existing approaches for this purpose assume that an inventory list of objects in the interrogation region of an RFID reader is known. This is not true in some cases. For example, for a handheld RFID reader, only the objects in a larger region (e.g., the warehouse) rather than in its interrogation region can be known. The additional objects significantly increase the time required for stocktaking. In this paper, we propose a time-efficient stocktaking algorithm called CLS (Coarse-grained inventory list based stocktaking) to solve this problem. We transform the problem to a missing tag identification problem with a large missing rate. CLS enables multiple missing objects to hash to a single time slot and thus verifies them together. CLS also improves the existing approaches by utilizing more kinds of RFID collisions and reducing approximately one-fourth of the amount of data sent by the reader. Extensive simulations are performed and the results show CLS outperforms the best existing algorithm.