Patent ID: 8120466

Claim:
A method of operating a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) reader to decode an encoded data signal from at least one RFID tag, the encoded data signal being a first-order Markov process sequence of symbols, the method comprising: receiving the encoded data signal from the at least one RFID tag; determining a correlation value for each candidate symbol at each symbol interval in the data signal; determining a modified correlation value for each candidate symbol at each symbol interval in the data signal, wherein the modified correlation value is based on a set of predetermined probabilities that a symbol occurs after another symbol, wherein the set of predetermined probabilities are time independent and based on logic of the encoding scheme used to encode the data signal, and wherein at least one candidate symbol comprises a modified correlation value of zero based on the fact that a symbol transition ending with the at least one candidate symbol does not occur in the encoding scheme; identifying, for each candidate symbol at each symbol interval including that at least one candidate symbol, an unique possible candidate value in the previous symbol interval; and assembling a decoded symbol sequence with the identified symbol for each symbol interval.