UHF RFID: Retail Store Performance

The development of UHF RFID technology has reached significant performance advancement in the last 20 years. Both tags and readers are now improved with better sensitivity levels providing a potential for achieving greater tag read ranges. However, the performances of the technology are also limited by complexity and electromagnetic (EM) properties of the environment in which the system operates. The aim of this contribution is to evaluate how well the state-of-the-art UHF RFID systems behave in an actual retail store environment rather than in a controlled anechoic setting. An extensive empirical study is performed and data for the performance analysis are collected from both a commercial reader and an USRP-based sniffer. It is shown that physical and MAC layer should be considered cooperatively in order to improve the overall system performance. Specifically, although the tag responsiveness depends on the products’ EM properties as well as the number of products and their relative position in the basket, still the appropriate reader mode of operation can ensure a reliable and stable reading process. For the item identification and localization in the smart IoT stores, the EM properties of retail products should be taken into account in the data classification.