Efficient 3-dimensional localization for RFID systems using jumping probe

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology manifests its potential in widespread applications, such as warehouse management, library maintenance and product tracking, etc. One of the most important characteristics for RFID-based applications is their 3-Dimensional localizability. Recently, researchers have proposed some 3-Dimensional RFID-based localization schemes, but most of them suffer from low efficiency. In this paper, we target at improving the efficiency of RFID-based localization, including energy efficiency and time efficiency, without sacrificing localization accuracy. The main idea is to adopt a “jumping probe” in distance estimation, based on which we propose the 3-Dimensional RFID-based localization schemes called JumpLoc, including a passive scheme two active schemes. In the passive JumpLoc scheme, a target tag will be located based on the estimated distances between itself and some reference readers. While the active schemes include basic and enhanced active JumpLoc schemes to locate a target reader. We numerically analyze the localization efficiency improvement of the proposed JumpLoc schemes. We also conduct simulations to validate their effectiveness, the results of which show that the passive JumpLoc scheme can improve the energy efficiency and time efficiency by at least 56% and 34% respectively, and the active JumpLoc schemes can improve the energy efficiency and time efficiency by at least 82% and 83% respectively.