Readers Scheduling for RFID Networks in the IoT Era

As a potential way to dramatically save energy and live in a green planet, the Internet of Things (IoT) aims to utilize energy-efficient enabling technologies such as the RFID systems in our daily life applications. In this paper, we consider RFID reader scheduling problem which is NP hard. We propose a localized reader scheduling algorithms for RFID networks. We consider readers with limited amounts of energy, powered by a battery. Using only local information, the readers schedule themselves to minimize energy usage and maximize network lifetime. We compare the performance of our localized algorithms to a centralized heuristic based on a set cover approximation solution and show that the localized algorithms obtain equal or better performance in comparison to the centralized solution