A method to make accurate inventory of smart meters in multi-tags group-reading environment

RFID plays a very important role as auto-identification solution for many industrial applications. In electric power industry, UHF RFID tags are attached on smart meters, and a tag provides a unique electronic identification for a smart meter, so RFID is applied to make asset inventory for smart meters in a warehouse. However, there are just about 95% of tags that are readable for their reader because of the interference of PCB and electronic components in smart meter, thereby it has to take a lot of time to manually find out the non-responsive tags. This paper puts forward a feasible method of testing tag's performance according to multi-tags group-reading environment in the application of smart meter asset inventory, and verifies the feasibility of the method through inventory experiments, and finally gives out an optimized parameters to read 100% of tags with the sensitivity of -16.25dBm in a multi-tags environment. The method is suitable for the test of large quantities of smart meters that are densely packed in a plastic box. The proposed method can guide electric power companies to select tags and readers, and improve the efficiency of inventory for smart meters asset management.

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