A smart collision recovery receiver for RFIDs

In this work, we focus on framed slotted Aloha (FSA) and passive ultra high-frequency radio frequency identification multi-antenna systems with physical layer collision recovery. We modify the tags slightly by adding a so-called ‘postpreamble’ that facilitates channel estimation. Furthermore, we investigate the throughput performance of advanced receiver structures in collision scenarios. More specifically, we analyse the throughput of FSA systems with up to four receive antennas that can recover from a collision of up to eight tags on the physical layer and acknowledge all tags involved in that collision. Due to the higher collision recovery capabilities, the frame sizes can be significantly reduced, and thus, the throughput can be increased. We also derive analytically optimal frame sizes, given that a certain number of collisions can be resolved. We further study the constraints to the throughput due to the structure of our receiver and channel estimation for different collision scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a novel collision recovery method with two phases: first, a successive interference cancellation and, second, a projection of the constellation into the orthogonal subspace of the interference. Additionally, the inventory time, i.e. the number of slots necessary to successfully decode all tags in the reader range, is calculated and compared for different receiver types. A validation of our theoretical predictions is achieved by means of simulations. We show that by our proposed methods, we can realistically achieve more than ten times higher throughput or, equivalently, a reduction of the inventory time by more than 90%.