Stability Analysis of Frame Slotted Aloha Protocol

Frame Slotted Aloha (FSA) protocol has been widely applied in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems as the de facto standard in tag identification. However, very limited work has been done on the stability of FSA despite its fundamental importance both on the theoretical characterisation of FSA performance and its effective operation in practical systems. In order to bridge this gap, we devote this paper to investigating the stability properties of FSA by focusing on two physical layer models of practical importance, the models with single packet reception and multipacket reception capabilities. Technically, we model the FSA system backlog as a Markov chain with its states being backlog size at the beginning of each frame. The objective is to analyze the ergodicity of the Markov chain and demonstrate its properties in different regions, particularly the instability region. By employing drift analysis, we obtain the closed-form conditions for the stability of FSA and show that the stability region is maximised when the frame length equals the backlog size in the single packet reception model and when the ratio of the backlog size to frame length equals in order of magnitude the maximum multipacket reception capacity in the multipacket reception model. Furthermore, to characterise system behavior in the instability region, we mathematically demonstrate the existence of transience of the backlog Markov chain.Comment: 14 pages, submitted to IEEE Transaction on Information Theor

ASAP: A MAC Protocol for Dense and Time-Constrained RFID Systems

We introduce a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol for radio frequency identification (RFID) systems which exploits the statistical information collected at the reader. The protocol, termed adaptive slotted ALOHA protocol (ASAP), is motivated by the need to significantly improve the total read time performance of the currently suggested MAC protocols for RFID systems. In order to accomplish this task, ASAP estimates the dynamic tag population and adapts the frame size in the subsequent round via a simple policy that maximizes an appropriately defined efficiency function. We demonstrate that ASAP provides significant improvement in total read time performance over the current RFID MAC protocols. We next extend the design to accomplish reliable performance of ASAP in realistic scenarios such as the existence of constraints on frame size, and mobile RFID systems where tags move at constant velocity in the reader's field. We also consider the case where tags may fail to respond because of a physical breakdown or a temporary malfunction, and show the robustness in those scenarios as well