Approaches to fast sequential inventory and path following in RFID-enriched environments

Although RFID is mostly used for ticketing, e-passports and supply chain management applications, the technology is also suitable for transponder based navigation systems. There it can be applied to leave a virtual trace on writeable RFID tags. These applications use RFID in a different way, because the tags are stationary and related to each other, since each tag of the path points to the following one. This offers the possibility to develop more efficient algorithms for their detection. In this paper, we suggest to store the identifying masks of subsequent tag IDs on the tags. The approach can easily be used with query-tree anti-collision methods. We examine the requirements for such an approach and describe a concrete algorithm, which is simulated and compared with different anti-collision algorithms.