Method and apparatus for determining ordering of RFID tagged objects

摘要

The invention addresses the disadvantage of RFID scanning by maintaining the relative physical order of tags simultaneously scanned. The novelty of the invention includes a forwarding mechanism applied to the RFID tags and an aggregation of the received tag information. The received information is then used to calculate relative ordering information. Our system leverages both reader-to-tag and tag-to-tag communication. Each tag in the invention can measure the received signal strength and the ID of the sender. Tags respond to received signals by transmitting their ID and a payload consisting of the ID & signal strength of the previous sender as well as the payload received from the previous sender. The reader then aggregates this information from which is calculated the relative physical ordering of the tags based on the aggregated information.