In other words, the optimal interval of RFID distribution for k-NN-based positioning was derived. However, for economical reasons, not all of the RFID tags produced are designed to provide signal strength information. Instead, they simply indicate whether a tag is detected or not within the given detection range. Moreover, the inconsistency of signal strength reception, caused by multipath and interference in the presence of obstacles, is a practical problem in k-NN-based positioning [7,15]. Thus, in the present study, it was assumed that no signal strength information is given. Also, reference tags were assumed to be regularly distributed in 1-dimensional, 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional spaces corresponding to various environments in the real world.2.?Background2.1.

RFID-based Positioning Using k-NN AlgorithmThe k-NN algorithm determines the attribute of a query point by taking the weighted average of the k nearest neighbors to the point, and as such is a highly effective inductive inference method [16]. In RFID-based positioning using the k-NN algorithm, the coordinates of a target point are determined as in Equation 1:(x,y)=��i=1kwi(xi,yi)/��i=1kwi(1)In Equation 1, (x, y) and (xi, yi) are the coordinates of a target point, and the i-th reference point, wi, is a weight factor. The weight factor is inversely-proportional to the Euclidian distance between the reference point and the target point in the signal domain, that is, the signal strength difference between the two points.

In the present study, the weight factor was simply set to 1 for detected tags and 0 for undetected ones, because the RFID system was assumed not to be provided with signal strength information for detected tags.2.2. Root GSK-3 Mean Square Error (RMSE)In statistics, the root mean squared error or RMSE is one of the ways to quantify the amount by which an estimator or a model differs from the true value of the quantity being estimated. The RMSE for 1-dimensional, 2- dimensional and 3-dimensional spaces can be obtained as in Equations 2 to 4:RMSE1D=��i=1n[(x^i?xi)2]n(2)RMSE2D=��i=1n[(x^i?xi)2+(y^i?yi)2]n(3)RMSE3D=��i=1n[(x^i?xi)2+(y^i?yi)2+(z^i?zi)2]n(4)where (x?i), (x?i, ?i) and (x?i, ?i, i) are the estimated coordinates, (xi), (xi, yi) and (xi, yi, zi) are the true coordinates, and n is the total number of observations.3.?Determination of Optimal Detection Range3.1. Overview of Present StudyFor a simulated RFID-based positioning system, it was assumed that the reference tags were regularly distributed on a line in 1-dimensional space, on a regular grid in 2-dimensional space, and on a cubic lattice in 3-dimensional space.