A time and energy saving based frame adjustment strategy (TES-FAS) tag identification algorithm for UHF RFID systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is widely applied in massive items tagged domains. Existing medium access control (MAC) solutions primarily focus on improving slot efficiency or reducing the total number of slots. However, with pervasive applications of RFID, the time and energy consumption are increasingly important and should be considered in the new design. In this paper, we re-exam the problem of tag identification in UHF RFID system from the perspective of time and energy consumption. The presented work comprehensively reviews and analyzes the prior tag reading protocols. Based on prior art, we further discuss a novel design of tag reading algorithm to improve both time and energy efficiency of EPC C1 Gen2 UHF RFID standard. By exploring the effectiveness of embedding slot-by-slot mechanism in a sub-frame observation phase and combine the sub-frame and slot-by-slot observation in the proposed algorithm, which can achieve more fine-grained frame size adjustment with time and energy-efficiency. Moreover, the cardinality estimation function of the algorithm is implemented by the look-up tables, which allows dramatically reduction in computational complexity and energy consumption. Both simulation results and experiments show clear performance improvement over the commercial solutions.