Perfect tag identification protocol in RFID networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel RFID tag identification protocol that guarantees 100% efficiency through recursive splitting, outperforming existing methods with about 42% average performance, at the cost of more advanced hardware.

Contribution

The paper presents a new RFID identification protocol that ensures perfect performance using recursive splitting, improving reliability over previous approaches.

Findings

Achieves 100% tag identification efficiency under certain assumptions.

Outperforms existing methods with about 42% average performance.

Requires more sophisticated hardware in low-cost tags.

Abstract

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.