Multi-Range Query in Commodity RFID Systems

Yanyan Wang, Jia Liu, Zhihao Qu, Shen-Huan Lyu, Bin Tang, Baoliu Ye

Abstract: Range Query (RQ) is to check whether there are any RFID tags with data beyond a given range. With about 46 billion RFID tags sold worldwide in 2023, time-efficient RQ becomes increasingly important for practical use, which can help users quickly pinpoint the target tags (if any) and give an early warning (e.g., fire alarm) to them for taking urgent actions and reducing the potential risk. However, existing work can deal with only a single range rather than multiple ranges that are very common in real-world applications. For example, foods in the refrigerator and the freezer have different temperature ranges for safe storing; treating them as one would probably give rise to query errors. In this paper, we study an under-investigated problem called multi-range query, which aims to achieve RQ in an RFID system with multiple query ranges. We propose a tailored protocol called anomalous tag identification (ATI) that quickly separates target tags from others and avoids querying all tags for saving communication overhead. In ATI, we design a fixedlength encoding vector together with standards-compliant select commands to deal with different ranges individually, without the need for any hardware modification. We implement the proposed protocols in commodity RFID systems. Experimental results show that ATI is superior to the baseline under different parameters, in terms of the time efficiency and space efficiency.

External IDs:dblp:conf/iwqos/WangLQLTY25