Theory and performance evaluation of group coding of RFID tags

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology which identifies physical objects individually according to their unique identifiers (ID) recorded in each RFID tag. Many business processes require the integrity verification of a group of objects in addition to individual object identification. This paper proposes "group coding" of RFID tags with which we can verify the integrity of groups of objects by writing parity check data to the memory of RFID tags. It was revealed by simulations and experiments that we could determine the number of missing RFID tags up to 10 with accuracy over 99% when we write 96 bits of the checksum data to 20 RFID tags. The whole duration of group decoding measured in the experiment was approximately 2 to 3 s. The time to compute group encoding and decoding was in the order of several milliseconds and thus negligible. The RFID inventory accounts for the majority of the duration.