The propagation parameters on RFID-localization accuracy

While in the near future everything will be tagged with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, the localization of these tags in their environment is becoming an important feature for many RFID-based ubiquitous computing applications. The problem being tackled here relates to the problem of object location in wireless sensor networks, it is a specific problem in localization. Localization primarily refers to the detection coordinates of a node or an object. This work presents an approach named multidimensional scaling for estimating the location of unknown RFID tags, within the area to facilitate locating all tags in a RFID network and reduce the localization cost and environment complexity. It measures the distances between the reader and tags using the log normal distance path loss propagation model for indoor environment based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) measurement. The main advantage of this technique is reduction the number of expensive RFID readers and it can better tolerate noises. However, signals in indoor environments are generally harshly impaired because of multipath propagation and the variable factors in the surrounding environment, resulting in the tags have very limited capabilities which pose many challenges for positioning them. This work presents also the effect of propagation parameters on the localization accuracy by varying these parameters to observe the probability distribution of estimated distance, where the propagation parameters in indoor environments make working with signal strength measurements challenging.