MIT-AUTOID-TR-003 Efficient Memoryless Protocol for Tag Identification

This paper presents an efficient collision resolution protocol and its variations for the tag identification problem, where an electromagnetic reader attempts to obtain within its read range the unique ID number of each tag. The novelty of our main protocol is that each tag is memoryless, i.e., the current response of each tag only depends on the current query of the reader but not on the past history of the reader’s queries. Moreover, the only computation required for each tag is to match its ID against the binary string in the query. Theoretical results in both time and communication complexities are derived to demonstrate the efficiency of our protocols.