A new anti-collision protocol for RFID networks

Abstract

The speed at which RFID tags are read is critical to many RFID applications. Tag collisions can increase the time to gather information from tags in RFID networks. These collisions are unavoidable; however the time spent on them can be reduced using an intelligent medium access protocol. In this paper, the authors present a unique anti-collision protocol that scans for collided and empty slots in an RFID network before querying for tag IDs. The new proposed protocol uses a modified version of the bit scan technique to scan for unsuccessful slots. By identifying these slots using a low overhead scan process, the penalty of collisions and empty slots during the query process is reduced and thus a better end-to-end tag reading time is observed.