EraRFID: Reliable RFID systems using erasure coding

Current RFID systems are not utterly reliable as they may fail to read all the tags present in their RF field of view, particularly when dealing with bulk tag reading in messy situations. To enable reliable tag inventories, we put forward the concept of RFID tag grouping, i.e., logically coupling tags thus forming a consistent group. Tag grouping allows to identify missing tags by reading only a subset of the group, with no need to external information systems. In this paper, we introduce EraRFID, an erasure coding approach for RFID tag grouping. EraRFID models RFID tag inventorying as an erasure coding problem, and solves this problem using the well-known Reed Solomon (RS) codes. The efficiency of EraRFID in terms of timeliness and storage overhead is validated through experimental studies.