A System Model for Cooperative RFID Readpoints

Exploiting spatial diversity by means of cooperative readpoints is a popular approach to the missing tag problem in radio frequency identification (RFID) systems. However, there is little theory behind this approach, and RFID system design is often limited to trial-and-error and extensive experiments. In this paper, we present a system model for cooperative readpoints based on a correlated binomial distribution. The model can be used to determine the required number of readpoints for a given requirement and provides an online estimate of the system performance at runtime. The analysis of a real-world dataset justifies our modeling assumptions and shows that the diversity concept is able to significantly enhance system performance.