Installation and Evaluation of RFID Readers on Moving Vehicles

Abstract

Due to recent technology advancements, RFID readers have been proposed for several vehicular applications ranging from safe navigation to intelligent transport. However, one ob- stacle to deployment is the unpredictable read performance. An RFID reader occasionally fails to read an RFID tag even in static circumstances, mostly due to collisions. In a mo- bile vehicular environment, latency becomes the key perfor- mance factor because of the high speed of vehicles. This is particularly true when the RFID reader is on the moving vehicle. In this paper, we investigate RFID read latency and thus e®ectiveness of on-vehicles reader installations for a wide range of speeds. First, we experimentally study the impact of reader and tag relative positions on read errors and read rates. Then we conduct road experiments at varying speeds. The results reveal the critical factors that in°uence on-vehicle RFID read performance, and give us guidance to identify and pursue directions for improvement.