Experimental Validation of Anti-Collision Protocols for RFID Sensor Networks

Currently, there is an increasing interest in the use of RFID systems with passive or battery-less tags with sensors incorporated, also known as computational RFID (CRFID) systems. These passive tags use the reader signal to power up their microcontroller and an attached sensor. Following the current standard EPC C1G2, the reader must identify the tag (receive the tag’s identification code) prior to receive data from its sensor. In a typical RFID scenario, several sensor tags share the reader interrogation zone, and during their identification process, their responses often collide, increasing their identification time. Therefore, RFID application developers must be mindful of tag anti-collision protocols when dealing with CRFID tags in dense RFID sensor networks. So far, significant effort has been invested in simulation-based analysis of the performance of anti-collision protocols regarding the tags identification time. However, no one has explored the experimental performance of anti-collision protocols in an RFID sensor network using CRFID. This paper: (i) demonstrates that the impact of one tag identification time over the total time required to read one sensor data from that same tag is very significant, and (ii) presents an UHF-SDR RFID system which validates the improvement of FuzzyQ, a fast anticollision protocol, in relation to the protocol used in the current RFID standard.