Monitoring and Troubleshooting RFID Systems

This chapter discusses how to monitor and troubleshoot an RFID system. It explores three avenues: monitoring, measuring performance metrics, and troubleshooting. Monitoring and troubleshooting are essential parts of running an effective RFID system. Usually nonintrusive information (collected during the normal operation of a system) is enough to find the status of a device, whereas intrusive information (collected as part of monitoring but not available as part of normal operation) might be needed to help one look deeply into the problem and find its root cause. One can find the root cause of a problem using root-cause analysis (RCA), which is the application of a set of problem-solving methods based on identifying and eliminating (or correcting) the root causes of a problem. Problems are identified during monitoring via either status monitoring or performance monitoring. Status monitoring consists of monitoring the basic status of the system and its devices, such as whether the reader is powered on; performance monitoring consists of monitoring the performance of a system and the devices in the system via measuring performance metrics such as such as readers' read rates.