One More Tag Enables Fine-Grained RFID Localization and Tracking

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on networking Vol. 26; no. 1; pp. 161 - 174
• Main Authors: Xiao, Fu, Wang, Zhongqin, Ye, Ning, Wang, Ruchuan, Li, Xiang-Yang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.02.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antenna arrays; Antenna calibration; Antenna measurements; Antennas; Calibration; Geometry; hyperbolic positioning; Localization; multipath effect; Radio frequency identification; Radio signals; RFID tags; Tags; Tracking
• ISSN: 1063-6692; 1558-2566
• DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2017.2766526

Exploiting radio frequency signals is promising for locating and tracking objects. Prior works focus on per-tag localization, in which each object is attached with one tag. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive localization and tracking scheme by attaching two RFID tags to one object. Instead of using per-tag localization pattern, adding one-more RFID tag to the object exhibits several benefits: 1) providing rich freedom in RFID reader's antenna spacing and placement; 2) supporting accurate calibration of the reader's antenna location and spacing, and 3) enabling fine-grained calculation on the orientation of the tags. All of these advantages ultimately improve the localization/tracking accuracy. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that the average errors of localization and orientation of target tags are 6.415 cm and 1.330°, respectively. Our results also verify that the reader's antenna geometry does have impact on tag positioning performance.