A Method for Identifying Multiple RFID Tags in High Electromagnetic Interference Environments

Radio frequency identification (RFID) plays an important role in warehouse management. Unfortunately, the normal work environment in warehouses has electromagnetic interferences that cause reading failures. Failures can also be caused by other circumstances, such as collision between reading attempts, tag type, and hardware problems. Rather than propose a hardware-based approach, we propose a method based on information processing. We propose the points assignment (PA) method for the identification of multiple RFID tags based on the Hamming distances. The basic idea is to use all the readings, even if they contain errors. The method allows groups of tags to be identified in high-interference environments, where other methods have great difficulty for achieving error-free readings. The performance of the proposed method is compared with two other methods, showing that the PA achieves zero errors with fewer readings, and that it has more consistent performance as interference increases.