Power Control for Optimizing RFID Tag Reading Rate in Multi-Reader Environment: A Study on Conveyor Belt System

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems provide a mechanism to identify and track tagged objects using radio waves. It is an alternative for existing "bar code" identification of objects. However, to make the RFID system more efficient, most systems only use one or two readers to scan tagged items, which is far from enough. Hence many enterprises use multiple readers to achieve high performance. Other than that, companies increasing make use of multiple readers in conveyor belt systems. Some airports have conveyor belt systems utilizing RFID techniques to scan checked baggage for efficiently tracing suitcases of passengers. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze how to achieve the best passive RFID(Radio Frequency Identification) tag reading performance in a supply chain system (specifically, we focus on the conveyor belt system), in which case each tag would have the maximum time in the non-interference region in a dense reader environment. Two situations will be considered in this thesis. The first one is when the distances between neighboring readers are constant. The other is when the distances between neighboring readers are uniformly randomly distributed. A sensitivity analysis is performed on the above two cases in this thesis.