Towards adaptive continuous scanning in large-scale RFID systems

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology plays an important role in supply chain logistics and inventory control. In these applications, a series of scanning operations at different locations are often needed to cover the entire inventory (tags). In such continuous scanning scenario, adjacent scans inevitably read overlapping tags multiple times. Most existing methods suffer from low scanning efficiency when the overlap is small, since they do not distinguish the size of overlap which is an important factor of scanning performance. In this paper, we analytically unveil the fundamental relationship between the performance of continuous scanning and the size of overlap, deriving a critical threshold for the selection of scanning strategy. Further, we design an accurate estimator to approximate the overlap. Combining the estimate and a compact data structure, an adaptive scanning scheme is introduced to achieve low communication time. Through detailed analysis and extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms previous approach in total scanning time.