Perfect tag identification protocol in RFID networks

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) systems are becoming more and more popular in the field of ubiquitous computing, in particular for objects identification. An RFID system is composed by one or more readers and a number of tags. One of the main issues in an RFID network is the fast and reliable identification of all tags in the reader range. The reader issues some queries, and tags properly answer. Then, the reader must identify the tags from such answers. This is crucial for most applications. Since the transmission medium is shared, the typical problem to be faced is a MAC-like one, i.e. to avoid or limit the number of tags transmission collisions. We propose a protocol which, under some assumptions about transmission techniques, always achieves a 100% perfomance. It is based on a proper recursive splitting of the concurrent tags sets, until all tags have been identified. The other approaches present in literature have performances of about 42% in the average at most. The counterpart is a more sophisticated hardware to be deployed in the manufacture of low cost tags.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Merged Search Algorithms for Radio Frequency Identification Anticollision

Nowadays, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system enables the control of many devices over an open communication infrastructure ranging from a small home area network to the global Internet. Moreover, a variety of consumer products are tagged with remotely low-cost readable identification electromagnetic tags to replace Bar Codes. Applications such as automatic object tracking, inventory and supply chain management, and Web appliances were adopted for years in many companies. The arbitration algorithm for RFID system is used to arbitrate all the tags to avoid the collision problem with the existence of multiple tags in the interrogation field of a transponder. A splitting algorithm which is called Binary Search Tree (BST) is well known for multitags arbitration. In the current study, a splitting-based schema called Merged Search Tree is proposed to capture identification codes correctly for anticollision. Performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the original BST according to time and power consumed during the arbitration process. The results show that the proposed model can reduce searching time and power consumed to achieve a better performance arbitration

From M-ary Query to Bit Query: a new strategy for efficient large-scale RFID identification

The tag collision avoidance has been viewed as one of the most important research problems in RFID communications and bit tracking technology has been widely embedded in query tree (QT) based algorithms to tackle such challenge. Existing solutions show further opportunity to greatly improve the reading performance because collision queries and empty queries are not fully explored. In this paper, a bit query (BQ) strategy based Mary query tree protocol (BQMT) is presented, which can not only eliminate idle queries but also separate collided tags into many small subsets and make full use of the collided bits. To further optimize the reading performance, a modified dual prefixes matching (MDPM) mechanism is presented to allow multiple tags to respond in the same slot and thus significantly reduce the number of queries. Theoretical analysis and simulations are supplemented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed BQMT and MDPM, which outperform the existing QT-based algorithms. Also, the BQMT and MDPM can be combined to BQMDPM to improve the reading performance in system efficiency, total identification time, communication complexity and average energy cost

LPDQ: a self-scheduled TDMA MAC protocol for one-hop dynamic lowpower wireless networks

Current Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for data collection scenarios with a large number of nodes that generate bursty traffic are based on Low-Power Listening (LPL) for network synchronization and Frame Slotted ALOHA (FSA) as the channel access mechanism. However, FSA has an efficiency bounded to 36.8% due to contention effects, which reduces packet throughput and increases energy consumption. In this paper, we target such scenarios by presenting Low-Power Distributed Queuing (LPDQ), a highly efficient and low-power MAC protocol. LPDQ is able to self-schedule data transmissions, acting as a FSA MAC under light traffic and seamlessly converging to a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) MAC under congestion. The paper presents the design principles and the implementation details of LPDQ using low-power commercial radio transceivers. Experiments demonstrate an efficiency close to 99% that is independent of the number of nodes and is fair in terms of resource allocation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Tag anti-collision algorithms in RFID systems - a new trend

RFID is a wireless communication technology that provides automatic identification or tracking and data collection from any tagged object. Due to the shared communication channel between the reader and the tags during the identification process in RFID systems, many tags may communicate with the reader at the same time, which causes collisions. The problem of tag collision has to be addressed to have fast multiple tag identification process. There are two main approaches to the tag collision problem: ALOHA based algorithms and tree based algorithms. Although these methods reduce the collision and solve the problem to some extent, they are not fast and efficient enough in real applications. A new trend emerged recently which takes the advantages of both ALOHA and tree based approaches. This paper describes the process and performance of the tag anti-collision algorithms of the tree-ALOHA trend