Comparative Evaluation of Probabilistic and Deterministic Tag Anti-collision Protocols for RFID Networks

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an auto recognition system that consistis of a number of tags and readers. There could be multiple tags a reader should identify. Since a medium is shared by multiple tags, a collision occurs at the reader’s side when two or more tags get transmitted simultaneously. Therefore, anti-collision mechanism that collaborately arbitrates collisions is required. Tag anti-collision schemes can be classified into two approaches according to the way to determine the point of transmission time: probabilistic approach and deterministic approach. These two approaches show dissimilar performance according to situations because of difference of process property. In this paper, we analyze the most advanced ever-existing tag anti-collision schemes and standards, and evaluate the performance of them with newly proposed metrics in various network situations.