calculating intersection of spherical caps_part2-jr
TRANSCRIPT
3. Calculating the angle of the great arc of a spherical cap
3.1 Overview
For each of the reader antennas, the power received by the tag can be obtained from the Friis
equation:
If the orientation and the position of the reader antenna plus along with the position of the tag
antenna are known, it is easy to obtain the threshold value of the tag antenna gain below which
that the specific tag will not be activated. To simplify the formula, we utilize make the same
assumptions as made in Chapter 4, i.e. the reflection coefficient and are 0 and the
polarization loss factor is 0.5. Then the threshold tag antenna gain can be represented as
,
where is the minimum power required to activate the tag.
The antenna gain for a half-wave dipole antenna is only a function of only , and which
can be represented as
Therefore, a threshold value of can be obtained for each reader antenna, each of which
corresponds corresponding to the angle of the greatest arc of the spherical cap created by
that antenna. To differentiate between different reader antennas, is used to represent
the angle of spherical cap cast by reader antenna i. The bigger the value of is, the
larger the spherical cap is, and the more the number of unreadable orientations of the tag
point there are with respect to the specific reader antenna i. ) It is important to notice that
in the antenna gain function is the maximum angle between any two points on a
spherical cap and the reader axis; in other words, it is only half of the value of the great
arc angle of the spherical cap in Table 1.
3.2 Methodology
A closed form formula to calculate given the threshold value of the dipole antenna gain
has not been found in this research. The difficulty lies in the fact that is not
a typical trigonometric function. Although based on the plot of the antenna gain in Figure
6 below, it does appear to take a sine-likesinusoidal shape, it cannot be approximated
byinto a simple trigonometric function. Figure 7 plots two functions. The first one is
, which is the transformed antenna gain function obtained by dropping
the coefficient. The second one is , which is constructed in such a
way that it has the same period, and maximum and minimum values of as the first one. It
can be seen clearly that the second trigonometric function shows a different curvature
from the antenna gain function.
0 50 100 150 2000
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
1.2
1.4
1.6
1.8
Figure 6 Dipole antenna gain against
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
1.2
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Transformed dipoleantenna gain
sin(2θ-π/2)/2+0.5
Figure 7 Comparison between transformed antenna gain and a trigonometric function
Therefore, Iinstead of attempting a functional approximation, an off-line look-up table is
used in this research to map the value of and that of the corresponding . It is
important to realize that the threshold value of is unique only for the period of [0, π/2)
because a half-wave dipole antenna’s gain is a function of θi with a period of π and is symmetric
at θi = π/2. Therefore such a look-up table only needs to store the values for i from 0 to π/2.
Such a look-up table has severalthe following benefits. First, it is fairly fast to extract information
from because only a linear search is required once the value of antenna gain is given. Secondly,
because of the symmetry characteristics of the dipole antenna gain, the range of the search is
relatively small. All the values of the look-up table can be read directly into the memory without
compromising the system performance. Lastly, the antenna gain is monotonic monotone
increasing between 0 and π/2.
Table 1 Part of the look-up table
θi (in degree)30 0.28626531 0.30602832 0.32644833 0.34751734 0.36922935 0.39157436 0.41454137 0.43811838 0.46229139 0.48704440 0.5123641 0.5382242 0.56460443 0.59148744 0.61884545 0.646652
Table 2 shows part of the look up table for θi between 30 degrees and 34 45 degrees angle. A one-
dimension array is used to store the value of with the index from 0 to 90. In particular,
[0] is 0 because . A linear interpolation is used to obtain
the value of θi given a specific value of for . As stated before, the angle of the great arc in
the spherical cap is actually 2θi.
4. Calculating αi
αi is the angle between the plane of the great arc and the reader axis. After θi is obtained, all the
rest of the parameters in Table 1 will be calculated based on the methodology discussed in this
section. Instead of focusing on the 3-D space, a linear search along 1-D space is used [ Huang,
Tseng and Lo]. In this section, we first examine the relationship between different parameters in
the Table 1, i.e. how to calculate the values of the rest of the parametersm given the value of one
of the parameters and θi . This is important because in fact αi cannot be obtained directly in this
methodology. We tThen we introduce the algorithm in its simplified geometric form. Lastly, we
deal with issues of implemeantation such as spherical coordinate rotation, etc.
4.1 Relationship between different parameters
For conveniencet, part of the Table 1 is shown below in Table 3.
Table 2 Partial list of notation
li The arc of the intersection area that
lies in SCiri
Li The great arc that passes the end
points of li and falls into the
intersection region
Φi The arc angle of li
γi The arc angle of Li
αi The angle between the great circle
plane that contains Li and OPi
hi The distance between the center of
γi
Φi
SCiri and the center of the unit ball
bi The distance between the center of
SCiri and intersection line of Li and
SCiri
Si The lune-shape area that is formed
by Li and li
If we assume Φi is known, then
Therefore, once we can getobtain Φi , the values of the rest of the parameters are a functions of
both Φi and θi. In the next sub section, we will show thathow to obtaining the area of Si is also a
SCi
li
Li
Pi
O
αi
Si
hi
bi
function of the set of above set of parameters. However, Tthe rest of this section will be devoted
to the calculation of Φi since the calculation of θi is explained in the previous section.
4.2 Calculating Φi
4.2.1 Dot product test
Φi is the angle for the arc of the intersection area that lies in the spherical circle SCiri. To simplify
the calculation, we assume that the reader axis OPi is the z- axis and the tag point O is the origin,
so that each point q on the spherical circle SCiri can be represented as
where
Here Φi corresponds to the arc of SCiri which lies within another spherical cap SCj.
Lemma1: Let OPj be the reader axis for the jth reader with its angle of the great arc of a spherical
cap θj. Then point q is within the SCj if, and only if where and is are
the points q and OPj expressed as unit vectors format of point q and OPj.
Proof: The dot product of two units vectors and is the cosine angle of the two
vectors. If such an angle is smaller than the half of the great arc angle, then point q is
within the spherical cap SCj based on its definition.
Figure 8 An example of a point q within SCj
Therefore, for each of each point q on the spherical circle SCiri, a dot product can be compared
against the value of can be used to determine whether or not such a point is within
spherical cap SCj.
4.2.2 Algorithm
A linear search method is used to obtain the value of Φi which and is stated below.
1 ;2 _found = false;3 _found = false;4 while ( _found = true and _found = true) 5 {6 get xq, yq, zq;7
if ( ) and ( _found = false )
8 ;9 end if10
if ( ) and ( _found = true) and ( _found = false)
11 ;12 end if13 = +1;14 } loop15 ;16 if ( = 0)17 {18 ;19 _found = false;20 _found = false;21 while ( _found = true and _found = true) 22 {23 get xq, yq, zq;24
if ( ) and ( _found = false )
25 ;26 end if27
if ( ) and ( _found = true) and ( _found = false)
28 ;29 end if30 = -1;31 } loop32 ;33 }34 return ;
From lLines 4 to line 15 represent, an iteration is used to search for the range of for .
However, there is a special case that the ranger of may go across the arbitrary start/end
point which is 0 degreeHowever, it should be noted that in fact, x degrees is the same as
(360+x) degrees, and since we arbitrarily select 0/360 as the start/end point for the linear
search, we need to account for the case where 0 and 360 both lie within the range for .
To solve this special scenario as shown in Figure 9, lines 16 to line 33 repeat the linear
search from 360 downward if in the previous search the value of is 0.
Figure 9 An example of two intervals for calculating Φi
Although the search does not stop until both ends of the interval for Φi is are found, the iteration
will stop before reaches 360. This is because all the degeneracy degenerate scenarios will be
eliminated beforehand. A bisection search can could be used effectively to speed up the process
section. if If there were no special scenarios such as the above wheren the value of Φi should be is
obtained from two intervals instead of one intervals, bisection search can be convenient and fast.
In practice, the author it was found that such special scenarios are very common while the
interval length is seldom very long; therefore a simple linear search is used in the algorithm.
4.3 Coordination transformation: translation and rotation
AtIn the beginning of Sectionthe 4.2, to simply the descriptionelaboration of the algorithm, we
assumed that the reader axis OPi is is the z z-axis and the tag point O is the origin. However the
value of which is the vector form of point q will be used to obtain the dot product with OPj
(the reader axis of antenna j) in order to test whether q is within the spherical cap SCj. All vectors
should be using the same coordinate system in order to obtain the correct values. This subsection
gives the details of such the required coordinate transformation processes.
4.3.1 Coordinate translation
Overall, all calculation will be based on the translated coordinate system where the tag point is
the origin while overall there will be no rotation process involved except in the second step.
Therefore, all vectors and points should be translated into the tag-point-origin system.
Let Suppose the current tag point in the global coordinate system has the coordinates
, and let the reader antenna is be at ., then Then the unit vector should be
where r is the length of .
4.3.2 Coordinate rotation
0 36001 2
In the previous subsection, we assume that the z- axis will be aligned with OPi. Therefore, each
point q on the spherical circle SCiri can be represented as
where
However, this coordinate is based on the rotated coordinate system., in In order to obtain the dot
product , the vector should be “rotated back” to the translated system where there is no
axis rotation and the origin rests on the tag point.
In order to rotate axis z back to OPi, the rotation axis and the rotation angle should be found. The
axis of the rotation is defined as a line around which the spinning is donerotation occurs. If a
vector v1 becomes v2 after rotation, the axis of the rotation is perpendicular to the plane which
contains both vectors. Figure 10 shows an example of axis rotation.
Figure 10 Example of rotation
Let , then the axis of the rotation will be (-b, -a, 0). This can be proved
easily since both the dot product of (-b, -a, 0) and and the dot product ofat between (-
b, -a, 0) and (0, 0, 1) is are 0, which means the angle between each pair of the vectors is
90 degrees.
The rotation angle α can be represented as . Based
on geometric calculations, for a given point q(x,y,z) in the rotated local coordinate, its
original global coordinates areis
From these this set of equations, all points on the spherical circle will be converted into
the coordinate system where the tag point is as it was the originally, without any rotation.
The dot product tests with coherent coordinate system will be valid in order to obtain the
value of Φi.