Efficiently Filtering RFID Data Streams

RFID holds the promise of real-time identifying, locating, tracking and monitoring physical objects without line of sight, and can be used for a wide range of pervasive computing applications. To achieve these goals, RFID data has to be collected, filtered, and transformed into semantic application data. RFID data, however, contains false readings and duplicates. Such data cannot be used directly by applications unless they are filtered and cleaned. While RFID data often arrives quickly and is in high volume, its detection usually demands efficient processing, especially for those real-time monitoring applications. Meanwhile, the order preservation of RFID tag observations are critical for many applications. In this paper, we propose several effective methods to filter RFID data, including both noise removal and duplicate elimination. Our performance study demonstrates the efficiency of our methods.