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Dude, where's my card?: RFID positioning that works with multipath and non-line of sight

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

RFIDs are emerging as a vital component of the Internet of Things. In 2012, billions of RFIDs have been deployed to locate equipment, track drugs, tag retail goods, etc. Current RFID systems, however, can only identify whether a tagged object is within radio range (which could be up to tens of meters), but cannot pinpoint its exact location. Past proposals for addressing this limitation rely on a line-of-sight model and hence perform poorly when faced with multipath effects or non-line-of-sight, which are typical in real-world deployments. This paper introduces the first fine-grained RFID positioning system that is robust to multipath and non-line-of-sight scenarios. Unlike past work, which considers multipath as detrimental, our design exploits multipath to accurately locate RFIDs. The intuition underlying our design is that nearby RFIDs experience a similar multipath environment (e.g., reflectors in the environment) and thus exhibit similar multipath profiles. We capture and extract these multipath profiles by using a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) created via antenna motion. We then adapt dynamic time warping (DTW) techniques to pinpoint a tag's location. We built a prototype of our design using USRP software radios. Results from a deployment of 200 commercial RFIDs in our university library demonstrate that the new design can locate misplaced books with a median accuracy of 11~cm.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM
    August 2013
    580 pages
    ISBN:9781450320566
    DOI:10.1145/2486001
    • cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
      ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 43, Issue 4
      October 2013
      595 pages
      ISSN:0146-4833
      DOI:10.1145/2534169
      Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 27 August 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. RFID
    2. dtw
    3. localization
    4. sar

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    SIGCOMM'13
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    SIGCOMM'13: ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference
    August 12 - 16, 2013
    Hong Kong, China

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    SIGCOMM '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 246 submissions, 15%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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    • (2025)Subcentimeter Localization from Behind the WallGetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications10.1145/3714983.371499328:4(27-31)Online publication date: 21-Jan-2025
    • (2024)Mining User Activity Patterns from Time-Series Data Obtained from UWB Sensors in Indoor EnvironmentsIEICE Transactions on Information and Systems10.1587/transinf.2023IHP0002E107.D:4(459-467)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
    • (2024)RF-Monitor: Smart RFID Solution for Industrial Electrical Cabinet Door MonitoringProceedings of the First International Workshop on Radio Frequency (RF) Computing10.1145/3698386.3699987(20-24)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
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    • (2024)Hydra: Exploiting Multi-Bounce Scattering for Beyond-Field-of-View mmWave RadarProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690710(1545-1559)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
    • (2024)See Through Vehicles: Fully Occluded Vehicle Detection with Millimeter Wave RadarProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690658(740-754)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
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