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Revisiting Cardinality Estimation in COTS RFID Systems

Published: 02 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

With 30 billion RFID tags sold worldwide in 2021, a common basic functionality needed by RFID-enabled applications is cardinality estimation --- to quickly estimate the number of distinct tags in an RFID system. Although many advanced solutions have been proposed over the past decade, they suffer from one major limitation in practical use: they need to either modify the existing RFID standard or obtain MAC-layer information, both of which however cannot be supported by commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices. In this paper, we revisit the counting problem and propose a novel counting scheme called average time duration based counter (ATD) that quickly estimates the number of distinct tags in a standards-compliant manner. Compared with existing work, the competitive advantage of ATD is that it can be directly deployed on a COTS RFID system, with no need for any hardware modifications. In ATD, we found a new and measurable indicator --- the time duration between two adjacent singleton slots, which depends on the number of tags. Following this observation, we derive the theoretical relationship between the time indicator and the number of tags and then give the proof of the estimation as well as its parameter settings. Additionally, we propose a flag-flipping solution to address the overlapping problem in the multi-reader case. We implement ATD in a COTS RFID system with 1000 tags. Experimental results show that ATD is 4.2× faster than the baseline of tag inventory; the performance gain will be further increased in a larger RFID system.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Localization and ApplicationApplied Sciences10.3390/app1413593214:13(5932)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)A Protocol Stack for Large-Scale RFID Systems: Mitigating Reader and Tag CollisionsIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.339865011:19(30455-30468)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2024

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  1. Revisiting Cardinality Estimation in COTS RFID Systems

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ACM MobiCom '23: Proceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
      October 2023
      1605 pages
      ISBN:9781450399906
      DOI:10.1145/3570361
      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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      Published: 02 October 2023

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      Author Tags

      1. algorithms
      2. RFID
      3. cardinality estimation
      4. tag counting

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      • (2024)RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Localization and ApplicationApplied Sciences10.3390/app1413593214:13(5932)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
      • (2024)A Protocol Stack for Large-Scale RFID Systems: Mitigating Reader and Tag CollisionsIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.339865011:19(30455-30468)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2024

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