Using RFID for Accurate Positioning.docx

1、Using RFID for Accurate PositioningUsing RFID for Accurate PositioningAbstract.In Korea, telematics is regarded as the technology to enhance and make everyday-driving experience more comfortable and safer. An essential part of the telematics is navigation and it is mainly based on GPS as the choice

2、of positioning technology. The accuracy of GPS, however, is approximately ten to twenty meters. Combining with map-matching technologies, most navigation systems guide drivers with a best effort manner. In addition to telematics, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is an old but newly emerged tech

3、nology. In this paper, we incorporate RFID technology into a navigation system to improve the accuracy. The skeleton of the idea is as follows: install RFID tags on roads in a certain way, store very accurate location information along with other necessary information in the tags, add an RFID reader

4、 module to the navigation system, and use this new location information along with GPS and a gyroscope to produce highly accurate location information. With this scheme, the accuracy of positioning can be dramatically improved, especially in tunnels and in downtown areas. Preliminary results show th

5、at this idea is feasible. Key words: Positioning, RFID, Navigation, Telematics. 1. INTRODUCTION Telematics can be defined as the technology that enables a vehicle to exchange data via wireless communication in the form of services or applications. Core components of a telematics system include posit

6、ioning technology, Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI), and a navigation module. Over the last few years, telematics has drawn much attention in major industrial countries. Korea is one of the nations that endeavor to capitalize on telematics. In fact, the Ministry of Information and Communication of Kor

7、ea (MIC) has recently released its master plan called the IT839 Strategy to help the IT industry develop new technologies (MIC, 2004). The IT839 Strategy is a plan for activating eight services (WiBro, DMB, Home Network, Telematics, RFID, W-CDMA, Terrestrial Digital TV, VoIP), implementing three inf

8、rastructures (Broadband Convergence Network, Ubiquitous Sensor Network, IPv6), and developing nine new growth engines (Next-Generation Mobile Communications, Digital TV, Home Network, IT SoC, Next-Generation PC, Embedded SW, Digital Contents, Telematics, Intelligent Service Robot). Telematics is one

9、 of the eight new services and also one of the nine new growth engines in the IT839 Strategy. As mentioned above, positioning technology is a core component of telematics and most of telematics devices sold today rely on GPS as a choice of the positioning technology. With GPS, it is inherently diffi

10、cult, if not impossible, to get a position in a tunnel or in downtown areas surrounded by skyscrapers. This issue in GPS would not be resolved for many years to come. To enhance the accuracy to a level at which lane-by-lane route guidance can be possible, using RFID technology for positioning is pro

11、posed. RFID is not a new technology, rather its origin dates back to World War Two. Recently, RFID comes under the spotlight for its potential for changing the world by replacing barcodes and providing many services that are unknown today. In addition to the replacement of barcodes, RFID has gaining

12、 interests in mobile phone and consumer electronics industry. The RFID positioning can be divided into four steps: in the first step, install RFID tags on roads in a certain way, store very accurate location information along with other necessary information to the tags, add an RFID reader module to

13、 the navigation system, and use this new location information. Apart from the RFID system, we also propose to use a tag database. Due to the memory constraint on the tag and the data size that needs be written in a tag, the use of a database for tags is a necessary condition. In addition, the speed

14、of the RFID communication also makes the use of the tag database indispensable. Preliminary results show that the RFID communication speed does not solely depend on the bit data rate in the specification. one the less, it will be shown that retrieving ID from a tag can be done fast even at a high ve

15、locity (by the high velocity we mean 150km/h). Another performance study on the tag database access time indicates that the access time is marginal. In the RFID and telematics literature, there is not much research on RFID positioning pertinent to vehicle navigation. Kubitz et al. developed a techni

16、que for robot navigation using RFID (Kubitz et al., 1997). They, however, did not take the velocity of robots into account, whereas in vehicle navigation fast RFID communication would be crucial. Penttil et al. presented a performance study on an RFID system, in which they achieved reliable identification accuracy at up to 40 km/h ( Penttil et al. 2004). This paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 a brief overview of the RFID technology is given as backgroun