Simulations and experiments for optimal deployment of an RFID-based location-aware system

The proliferation of communication and mobile computing devices and local‐area wireless networks has cultivated a growing interest in location‐aware systems and services. An essential problem in location‐aware computing is the determination of physical locations. RFID technologies are gaining much attention, as they are attractive solutions to indoor localization in many healthcare applications. In this paper, we propose a new indoor localization methodology that aims to deploying RFID technologies in achieving accurate location‐aware undertakings with real‐time computation. The proposed algorithm introduces means to improve the accuracy of the received RF signals. Optimal settings for the parameters in terms of reader and reference tag properties were investigated through simulations and experiments. The experimental results indicate that our indoor localization methodology is promising in applications that require fast installation, low cost and high accuracy. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The proposed method targeted accurate RFID location tracking under large signal interference. With the introduction of a moving average filter, the overall accuracy of RFID location tracking improved approximately 5.2% when both the tracking and reference tags were significantly affected by electromagnetic interference (Case 1). The improvement was much more obvious to an amount of 84.6% when the tracking tag was somewhat intact while its neighboring reference tags were under significant signal interference (Case 2).