Adaptive Aloha anti-collision algorithms for RFID systems

In this paper, we propose two adaptive frame size Aloha algorithms, namely adaptive frame size Aloha 1 (AFSA1) and adaptive frame size Aloha 2 (AFSA2), for solving radio frequency identification (RFID) multiple-tag anti-collision problem. In AFSA1 and AFSA2, the frame size in the next frame is adaptively changed according to the real-time collision rate measured in the current frame. It is shown that AFSA1 and AFSA2 can significantly improve the transmission efficiency of RFID systems compared to the static Aloha, and AFSA2 produces transmission efficiency similar to that of the electronic product code (EPC) Q-selection algorithm (Variant II), while the mean identification delay of AFSA2 is much smaller than that of EPC Q-selection algorithm (Variant II). It is also shown that the transmission efficiency of AFSA2 and EPC Variant II is very close to its upper bound which is obtained by assuming that the reader knows the number of unidentified tags. It is worth noting that when the threshold of the collision rate is chosen to be 0.5 or 0.6, AFSA2 can maintain the transmission efficiency well above 0.65 for the case of a typical EPC code length of 96 bits and for the investigated range of tag population, i.e., from 2 to 1000, while keeping the mean identification delay below ten transmit contentions. Very light computational burden at the reader is needed: the reader needs only to measure the collision rate in the current frame and then to double or halve the frame size accordingly. No additional computational burden is required at the tag side.