Effect of factors on RFID tag readability-statistical analysis

Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is a generic term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify individual items. This paper examines the effect of different factors such as distance to the tag from antenna, height and position of antenna, effect of metals, and interference from other sources on readability of the tag. Experiments were conducted and readings were taken to consider the effect of the factors to identify the critical ones that affects the readability of the tag. Design of Experiments (DOE) was used; specifically 2^k factorial design and 2^(k-1) fractional factorial designs were considered to determine which factor/s contributes to the variation of readability. In addition, combined effects of factors were also analyzed. SAStrade software package was used to validate the data statistically. The two designs were compared and the best out of the two was chosen to develop a model. The developed model can be used to read the intensity of the tag (output) with 99.08% accuracy. Based on the analysis of the data we concluded that half fractional factorial design was the best fit for the experiment.