Efficient Cardinality Counting for Large-scale RFID Systems

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Efficient Cardinality Counting for Large-scale RFID Systems"

By

Mr. Chen QIAN


Abstract

The growing importance of pervasive operations such as location sensing,
object tracking, activity monitoring and cardinality computing has led to
increasing interests in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems.
Counting the population of a tag set, one of the most crucial operations
of dense RFID networks, seems to be a dilemma. Using tag identification
protocols to recognize all tags is a straightforward approach, but the
long latency is intolerable to most applications. Cardinality estimation
protocols, designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness, are not
able to obtain a precise result. Ideally, we would like to have a protocol
which can achieve the accuracy of former and the efficiency of latter. The
two main contributions of my work are 1. the LOttery Frame protocol (LoF),
a scheme that can quickly estimate the cardinality of a large tag set; and
2. the Precise and Anonymous Counting protocol (PAC), a scheme that
remarkably reduces the processing time and energy cost in comparison to
identification protocols, while still guaranteeing the result reliable and
precise. The theoretical analysis shows that both the average latency and
the energy cost can be significantly reduced by using my counting
protocols. The simulation-based performance evaluation also shows LoF and
PAC outperform existing possible schemes in tag estimation and precise
counting respectively.


Date:				Thursday, 22 May 2008

Time:				3:00p.m.-5:00p.m.

Venue:				Room 3405
				Lifts 17-18

Committee Members:		Prof. Lionel Ni (Supervisor)
				Dr. Lei Chen (Chairperson)
				Dr. Ke Yi



**** ALL are Welcome ****