Aisle-level scanning for pervasive RFID-based shopping applications

RFID technology is amongst the most revolutionary technologies that will shape tomorrow's pervasive retail sales. This technology offers an important set of opportunities which improve the shopping experience of customers when visiting any self-service store. Indeed, this technology is increasingly promising to the extent of a potential replacement the barcode system as new low cost RFID tag manufacturing procedures have emerged. This paper presents a novel and cost efficient approach to the application of RFID technology in pervasive retail sales, by shifting from cart level to aisle-level scanning, using new event management procedures at the level of the RFID middleware. These procedures include the use of localization and clustering algorithms in order to form purchase contexts. The motivation behind such approach is the reduction of RFID reader deployment and maintenance cost, its transparency to the customers, and its robustness.