Methods of selection and identification of RFID tags

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology with numerous benefits in applications where objects have to be identified automatically. However, cost, fragile tags, collision and reading errors are some of issues to be concerned with in an RFID implementation. Mainly, this paper proposes a method for tag identification and a method for the selection of the binary codes to program on the tags in order to facilitate the identification process. For the identification method a heuristic based on Hamming distance is developed where the basic idea is to utilize the information obtained in consecutive read attempts to help identify a tag. For the selection method three models based on Hamming distance are also developed which strive to find the set with the greatest dissimilarity among the codes. Computer simulations are performed to verify the validity of the proposed methods.