Efficient continuous scanning in RFID systems

RFID is an emerging technology with many potential applications such as inventory management for supply chain. In practice, these applications often need a series of continuous scanning operations to accomplish a task. For example, if one wants to scan all the products with RFID tags in a large warehouse, given a limited reading range of an RFID reader, multiple scanning operations have to be launched at different locations to cover the whole warehouse. Usually, this series of scanning operations are not completely independent as some RFID tags can be read by multiple processes. Simply scanning all the tags in the reading range during each process is inefficient because it collects a lot of redundant data and consumes a long time. In this paper, we develop efficient schemes for continuous scanning operations defined in both spatial and temporal domains. Our basic idea is to fully utilize the information gathered in the previous scanning operations to reduce the scanning time of the succeeding ones. We illustrate in the evaluation that our algorithms dramatically reduce the total scanning time when compared with other solutions.