Tagspin: High Accuracy Spatial Calibration of RFID Antennas via Spinning Tags

Recent years have witnessed the advance of RFID-based localization techniques that demonstrate high precision. Many efforts have been made locating RFID tags accurately with a mandatory assumption that the RFID reader's position is known in advance. Unfortunately, calibrating reader's location manually is always time-consuming and laborious in practice. In this paper, we present Tagspin, an approach using COTS tags to pinpoint the reader (antenna) quickly and easily with high accuracy. Tagspin enables each tag to emulate a circular antenna array by uniformly spinning on the edge of a rotating disk. We design an SAR-based method for estimating the angle spectrum of the target reader. Compared to previous AoA-based techniques, we employ an enhanced power profile modeling the relative signal power received from the reader along different spatial directions, which is more accurate and immune to ambient noise as well as measurement errors caused by hardware characteristics. Besides, we find that tag's phase measurements in practice are related to its <italic>orientation</italic>. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to point out this fact and quantify the relationship between them. By calibrating the phase shifts caused by orientation, the positioning accuracy can be improved by <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.7\times$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="duan-ieq1-2796092.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>. We have implemented Tagspin with COTS RFID devices and evaluated it extensively. Experimental results show that Tagspin achieves mean accuracy of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$7.3\; \mathrm{cm}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="duan-ieq2-2796092.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> with standard deviation of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.8\; \mathrm{cm}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="duan-ieq3-2796092.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> in 3D space.

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