Non-Line-of-Sight Localization of Passive UHF RFID Tags in Smart Storage Systems

The UHF radio-frequency identification (RFID) has gained growing attention for tagged object localization in smart storage systems. Due to Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) condition, it is challenging to accurately locate the position of tags inside closed spaces. In this paper, we propose a precise and cost-effective solution for tagged object localization in closed spaces, using only received signal strength (RSS) information. We establish a RSS profile for each tag and discover some important features of RSS profiles including uniqueness, time-variation, column-dependence and waveform-similarity. Based on these features, we propose a reference-free RSS-profile (RFRP) localization scheme. The advantage of our propose scheme is to accurately localize multiple tags in closed spaces by overcoming the challenges including the lack of pre-deployed reference tags, NLOS propagation, multi-path propagation and coupling effect. The RFRP scheme first roughly estimates tags’ coordinates based on Peak Asymmetry Factor, then acquires reference-tag substitutes through the similarity of RSS sequences. Subsequently, our scheme refines the relative positions of all tags by these substitutes. Finally all tags’ absolute positions are estimated through a RSS-ranging model. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our approach can achieve high ordering accuracy and localization accuracy for the tags inside closed spaces.