A Multiple Hashing Approach to Complete Identification of Missing RFID Tags

• Published in: IEEE transactions on communications Vol. 62; no. 3; pp. 1046 - 1057
• Main Authors: Xiulong Liu, Keqiu Li, Geyong Min, Yanming Shen, Liu, Alex X., Wenyu Qu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01-03-2014; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Channels; Communication channels; Detection, estimation, filtering, equalization, prediction; Educational institutions; Exact sciences and technology; Information, signal and communications theory; Inventory management; missing tag identification; multi-hashing; Occupation; Optimization; Protocol; Protocols; Radio frequency identification; Radiolocalization and radionavigation; Readers; RFID; RFID tags; Signal and communications theory; Signal, noise; Simulation; Synchronization; Systems, networks and services of telecommunications; Tags; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Transmission and modulation (techniques and equipments); Vectors; Performance evaluation; Transmission channel; Reader; RFID; missing tag identification; Simulation; multi-hashing; Hashing; Recursive method; Metric; System identification; RFID tag; Bar code; Radio frequency identification; Execution time
• ISSN: 0090-6778; 1558-0857
• DOI: 10.1109/TCOMM.2014.011914.130089

Owing to its superior properties, such as fast identification and relatively long interrogating range over barcode systems, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has promising application prospects in inventory management. This paper studies the problem of complete identification of missing RFID tag, which is important in practice. Time efficiency is the key performance metric of missing tag identification. However, the existing protocols are ineffective in terms of execution time and can hardly satisfy the requirements of realtime applications. In this paper, a Multi-hashing based Missing Tag Identification (MMTI) protocol is proposed, which achieves better time efficiency by improving the utilization of the time frame used for identification. Specifically, the reader recursively sends bitmaps that reflect the current slot occupation state to guide the slot selection of the next hashing process, thereby changing more empty or collision slots to the expected singleton slots. We investigate the optimal parameter settings to maximize the performance of the MMTI protocol. Furthermore, we discuss the case of channel error and propose the countermeasures to make the MMTI workable in the scenarios with imperfect communication channels. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of MMTI, and the results demonstrate that this new protocol significantly outperforms other related protocols reported in the current literature.