School of Information Systems bags Best Paper Award for addressing an important issue in RFID deployment

SMU School of Information Systems Professor Chu Chao Hsien and his co-authors, Meng Ma (Peking University, Beijing) and Ping Wang (Peking University, Beijing), received a Gold in the best paper award during the 2013 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) International Conference on RFID Technologies and Applications (RFID TA). The winning paper is titled ‘A Novel Distributed Algorithm for Redundant Reader Elimination in RFID Networks’. The conference was sponsored by IEEE Technical Committee on RFID and was held on 4-5 September 2013 in Malaysia.

RFID technology identifies people or objects using radio waves. It uses an RFID reader to read information contained in a tag attached to a person or object from a distance without needing personal intervention.

This paper addresses an important issue in RFID deployment called ‘Redundant Reader Elimination’. Redundant reader is a typical problem which consumes additional power and algorithm overhead for RFID systems development.  Therefore, eliminating redundant readers are of great importance to prolong the lifetime of RFID systems. This paper is also part of a bigger project in ‘RFID Middleware Design and Applications’, which was funded internally by Peking University, China and Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.

Professor Chu and his co-authors proposed a distributed algorithm for redundant reader elimination based on neighbouring coverage density (NCD). They also elaborate an optimisation scheme leveraging partially on movement detection (MD) in RFID systems, called NCDMD. The NCDMD algorithm achieves significant optimisation in tag-wire operation over NCD. The experiments show that both NCD and NCDMD algorithms are effective and of low overheads as compared to other distributed algorithms. In the performance simulation, they analyse the multi-phase scheme principle and its effect. NCD and NCDMD algorithms can further improve the performance or multi-phase approach in redundant reader elimination.

IEEE RFID TA is one of the two main conferences in RFID sponsored by IEEE Technical Committee on RFID (CRFID). IEEE RFID is held in the United States and RFID TA is rotated between Asian and Europe.

Professor Chu is currently working on a project titled ‘Real-time Heart Attack Detection using an Embedded Microcontroller’ which will have practical commercial value in chronic heart disease monitoring and detection.