Intro, or Project Overview
WHY
BENCHMARKING METHODOLOGY?
A major obstacle to the wide adoption of RFID technology is the lack of scientific guidelines by which the design of an
RFID system can be assessed before implementation. The problem is aggravated by the dependency of RF performance on its environments. The performance of RFID devices can be sensitive
to physical characteristics such as the use of different backing materials, orientations and reader antenna configurations.
It also depends on operational characteristics such as how close the RF tags are placed together, what the packaging is and how fast the tags are read. Besides, the performance is also affected by the ambient noise due to reflection, refraction, diffraction and absorption by structures and even human bodies. All these factors result in the received RF signal that can be distorted and noisy. Moreover, while the physical characteristics may be relatively static, the operational characteristics can change from one RFID application to another, and the noise characteristics can be highly unpredictable. Hence, assessing the adequacy and reliability of an RFID system before its deployment requires the use of a scientific benchmarking methodology that addresses the various determining factors of RF performance.
In other words, a successful RFID deployment depends not only on the product specification and standard, but also on other variables such as reader collision, tag collision, the natural environment factors and so on.
Our experience of the different projects confirmed that the performance of RFID solutions can be affected by many factors, such as antenna height, the density of tags, the number of antennas, read distance, backing materials, packaging, and so on. System engineers had little clue about how to configure these parameters except by trials-and-errors on the spot. Moreover, the effects of these parameters may interact. Isolating or tuning these parameters optimally is time consuming.
Addressing the challenges of RFID deployment, we have conducted a research program “RFID Benchmarking: Methodology and Practice” in
the first phase of project, to develop the scientific methodology for RFID benchmarking and testing. The preliminary study results show that the variety of RFID components leads to inaccurate
measurement and detection to RFID enabled LSCM applications.