Accurate RFID localization algorithm with particle swarm optimization based on reference tags

RFID technology has been widely used for object tracking in indoor environment due to their low cost and convenience for deployment. Existing RFID localization approaches rely on signal strength to measure the distance between RFID reader and tags. However, because of the environmental complexity and inferences, the measurement of distance by signal strength is not accurate, which causes large error in localization. In this paper we develop a novel algorithm to improve the RFID localization accuracy. Our algorithm is based on particle swarm optimization. More importantly, we add reference tags in the deployment, and design a parameter named Correction Factor in PSO to measure the distances more accurately by signal strength. The result shows that compared with the previous method without the correction factor, our proposed approach can increase the accuracy by 50. This method has good application prospect in equipment management.