Completely Pinpointing the Missing RFID Tags in a Time-Efficient Way

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computers Vol. 64; no. 1; pp. 87 - 96
• Main Authors: Xiulong Liu, Keqiu Li, Geyong Min, Yanming Shen, Liu, Alex X., Wenyu Qu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-01-2015; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: completely pinpointing; Computer simulation; Educational institutions; Electronic mail; Hospitals; Inventory management; Lower bounds; Mathematical models; missing tag; optimization; Protocols; Radio frequency identification; Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems; Real time; Real-time systems; Retail stores; RFID tags; Simulation; Tags; time efficiency; Vectors
• ISSN: 0018-9340; 1557-9956
• DOI: 10.1109/TC.2013.197

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in inventory management in many scenarios, e.g., warehouses, retail stores, hospitals, etc. This paper investigates a challenging problem of complete identification of missing tags in large-scale RFID systems. Although this problem has attracted extensive attention from academy and industry, the existing work can hardly satisfy the stringent real-time requirements. In this paper, a Slot Filter-based Missing Tag Identification (SFMTI) protocol is proposed to reconcile some expected collision slots into singleton slots and filter out the expected empty slots as well as the unreconcilable collision slots, thereby achieving the improved time-efficiency. The theoretical analysis is conducted to minimize the execution time of the proposed SFMTI. We then propose a cost-effective method to extend SFMTI to the multi-reader scenarios. The extensive simulation experiments and performance results demonstrate that the proposed SFMTI protocol outperforms the most promising Iterative ID-free Protocol (IIP) by reducing nearly 45% of the required execution time, and is just within a factor of 1.18 from the lower bound of the minimum execution time.