An Efficient Method for Optimizing RFID Reader Deployment and Energy Saving

The rapid proliferation of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) systems realizes integration of physical world with the cyber ones. One of the most promising is the Internet of Things (IoT), a vision in which the Internet extends into our daily activities through wireless networks of uniquely identifiable objects. Given that modern RFID systems are being deployed in large-scale for different applications, without optimizing reader’s distribution, many of the readers will be redundant, resulting waste of energy. Additionally, eliminating redundant readers can also decrease probability of reader collisions, as a result, enhancing system performance and efficiency. In this paper, an overlap aware (OA) technique is proposed for eliminating redundant readers. The OA is a distributed approach, which does not need to collect global information for centralizing control, aims to detect maximum amount of redundant readers could be safely removed or turned off with preserving original RFID network coverage. A significant improvement of the OA scheme is that the amount of “write-to-tag” operations could be largely reduced during the redundant reader identification phase. In order to accurately evaluate the performance of the proposed method, it was performed in a variety of scenarios. The experiment results show that the proposed method can provide reliable performance with detecting higher redundancy and has lower algorithm overheads as compared with several well known methods, such as the RRE, the LEO, the hybrid algorithm (LEO+RRE) and the DRRE. Keywords—Reader Distribution, Reader Coverage, Collision Problem, Energy Saving, Overlap Aware