Summary

This chapter gave you a solid overview of the challenging process of troubleshooting an RFID interrogation zone. You may have set up the reader yourself and are trying to find out why it doesn't work right, or you may have been called in to clean up someone else's mess. Either way, you have to follow a process to get to the root cause of the problem.

The first step is understanding what affects the performance of an RFID system. You learned that there are several dependencies that can affect read rate:

• Tags

• Readers

• Antennas

• Middleware

• Business processes

Next you looked at specific issues within an interrogation zone that may be caused by the zone's individual components. You learned some of the specific details of those subcomponents and how to investigate parts that might fail.

Finally I showed you a software tool that automates much of the deployment and troubleshooting. You saw how to set up a process for isolating variables and then test for a root-cause analysis. This is time-consuming and can be facilitated by an automated program. A repeatable process is also something that should be created as a standard protocol for testing poorly performing systems, gathering data on those systems, and creating a strategy to optimize them.