The concept for an UHF RFID reader described in this section should also meet these requirements. Concretely, the new reader should be versatile, satisfy the increased demand of information through localization abilities and have an increase in computational intelligence together with a stronger interconnection with superior software systems. In addition, the intelligent reader has to deal with the environmental conditions of a practical operation in logistic and production sites.

To achieve a flexible and changeable reader system the localization concept should not be bound to the needs of a certain infrastructure. Actually it should allow a compact design of the system to enable a certain mobility for a simplified change of operation site in order to realize changeability. Furthermore, it should deliver stable localization results even under difficult environmental circumstances as they are found in logistics.

The basic component of the concept is the reader's ability to localize tags. Therefore, initially a short review of existing localization approaches with UHF RFID is given, by the description of the localization method for the intelligent reader system, which estimates the direction of arrival of the tag's signal.