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Estimating Cardinality of Arbitrary Expression of Multiple Tag Sets in a Distributed RFID System

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology has been widely adopted in various industries and people’s daily lives. This paper studies a fundamental function of spatial-temporal joint cardinality estimation in distributed RFID systems. It allows a user to make queries over multiple tag sets that are present at different locations and times in a distributed tagged system. It estimates the joint cardinalities of those tag sets with bounded error. This function has many potential applications for tracking product flows in large warehouses and distributed logistics networks. The prior art is either limited to jointly analyzing only two tag sets or is designed for a relative accuracy model, which may cause unbounded time cost. Addressing these limitations, we propose a novel design of the joint cardinality estimation function with two major components. The first component is to record snapshots of the tag sets in a system at different locations and periodically, in a time-efficient way. The second component is to develop accurate estimators that extract the joint cardinalities of chosen tag sets based on their snapshots, with a bounded error that can be set arbitrarily small. We formally analyze the bias and variance of the estimators, and we develop a method for setting their optimal system parameters. The simulation results show that, under predefined accuracy requirements, our new solution reduces time cost by multiple folds when compared with the existing work.