Unified Q-ary Tree for RFID Tag Anti-Collision Resolution

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology uses radio-frequency waves to automatically identify people or objects. A large volume of data, resulting from the fast capturing RFID readers and a huge number of tags, poses challenges for data management. This is particularly the case when a reader simultaneously reads multiple tags and Radio Frequency (RF) collisions occur, causing RF signals to interfere with each other and therefore preventing the reader from identifying all tags. This problem is known as Missed reads, which can be solved by using anti-collision techniques to prevent two or more tags from responding to a reader at the same time. The current probabilistic anti-collision methods are suffering from Tag starvation problems so not all tags can be identified, while the deterministic methods suffer from too long Identification delay. In this paper, a “Unified Q-ary Tree Protocols” based on Query tree is presented. In empirical study compared with the Query tree and 4-ary tree, we show that the proposed method performs better, it requires less number of queries per complete identification, which results in less total identification time.