Anti -Collision Algorithm for RFID Tags

Anti-Collision Algorithm for RFID Tags

Selwyn Piramuthu
Information Systems and Operations Management, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL32611, USA E- mail: selwyn@ufl.edu

ABSTRACT: One of the advantages of RFID tags vis- -vis bar codes is the ease with which a batch of RFID tagged objects can be simultaneously read. Although this leads to faster read rates, the accuracy of these reads may suffer due to collisions, false reads, among others. We discuss collisions in general and present a modified algorithm. KeywordsRFID, Collisions, Tree- Based Algorithm .

INTRODUCTION

FID tags and bar codes have several common characteristics from an automatic identification perspective. While both bar codes and RFID tags have their pros and cons, one of the advantages of using RFID tags is that they can be simultaneously read as a batch. Clearly, this is beneficial in applications such as supply chains where the rate at which objects are read and identified is of paramount importance. Although RFID tags can be read much faster than bar codes in principle, the reality is not completely clear. For example, since RFID tags operate in RF frequency, their read rate accuracy can be affected by metallic shields or any other hostile media that may be present between the tag and reader (e.g., Tu and Piramuthu, 2008). The read rate accuracy may also be reduced due to tag and/or reader collisions. Collision, in the context of RFID tag reads, occurs when either several tags or several readers are simultaneously present in the same field. Tag collision occurs when a reader attempts to simultaneously read several tags. Similarly, reader collision occurs when two or more readers are simultaneously present in the same field (Piramuthu, 2008). Several means to approach and alleviate some of the problems associated with RFID tag/reader collision have been proposed in the literature. A majority of them are either based on the ALOHA protocol or some sort of treebased algorithm. We provide a brief discussion on ALOHA -based methods and then consider a tree-based approach to reduce RFID tag/reader collisions.

PROTOCOLS FOR REDUCING COLLISIONS

Several researchers have examined the issue of collision in RFID-tagged systems. The approaches taken in existing literature in this area fall into two broad categories: treebased algorithms (e.g., Huang and Tran, 2007; Myung and Lee, 2006) and variants of the ALOHA protocol (Chen and Lin, 2006; Khandelwal et al., 2007). There are also hybrid

algorithms that attempt to distill the beneficial aspects of the two (e.g., Shin, et al., 2007). The tree-based algorithms operate by sequentially traversing the tree from top to bottom, where each node of the tree has an additional component of a tags information. The root of the tree is common to all the tags, and each leaf node of the tree represents a specific tag. These algorithms narrow down the tag of interest by successively muting tags that are involved in collisions. Drawbacks of these algorithms include the number of iterations involved before the reader can identify any given tag, the complexities of circuits required in the tag itself to be able to respond to such readers, among others. The ALOHA-type of protocols, on the other hand, let the tags choose when (i.e., time slot) they respond. When collision occurs, the tags involved in the collision participate in further iterations until resolution occurs. The ALOHA-type of protocols clearly take less time to complete, although there is a positive probability for a tag to not be read within a given number of iterations. ALOHA was developed in the 1970s for a packet radio network at the University of Hawaii. Whenever a station has data, it transmits the data. The sender station finds out whether the transmission was successful or experienced a collision by listening to the broadcast. If there is a collision, the sender retransmits after a random wait period. This protocol involves the simplest of all reader design where the reader just listens. The tags periodically send data packets with random quiet periods. This protocol quickly adapts to varying number of tags. The theoretically proven maximum utilization with this protocol (assuming Poisson arrival) is 18.4%. Figure 1 provides an illustration of ALOHA, with four tags and a reader. Collision occurs, a s illustrated by the dark rectangles at the reader side, when two or more signals are received by the reader during the same (overlapping) time period. The slotted ALOHA protocol was an improvement where time is divided into discrete time intervals (slots) and a packet can only be transmitted at the beginning of a slot. It reduced the collision duration. Here, packets either

Anti -Collision Algorithm for RFID Tags collide completely or do not collide at all, i.e., no partialcollisions like in the pure ALOHA case. This protocol doubles the channel utilization of pure ALOHA to 36.8%. Figure 1 provides an illustration of the Slotted ALOHA protocol.

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readers side, in any given slot, it receives (a) no signal, (b) signal from one tag, or (c) signal from more than one tag. The slot under case (a) is considered a loss since no useful information was transmitted during that slot. The slot under case (b) is a successful case since the signal from this tag is received by the reader. Collision occurs in case (c), and the number of tags that replied in this slot is generally unknown. It is hard to estimate the initial number of tags present in the field of the reader. The frame length depends on the number of tags. Existing papers on RFID collision (as well as ALOHA , in general) assume that the tags choose a uniform distribution to determine the slots in which to rep ly.

PROPOSED ALGORITHM
A majority of tree-based algorithms are based on assigning an n-bit identifier to each tag, and exhaustively considering every bit to distinguish and identify any given tag. However, this can soon become combinatorially explosive depending on the depth of the binary tree. As seen in Figure 2, if

Fig. 1: Collision and Multiple Access Protocol

The framed slotted ALOHA protocol incorporated further discretization of time b grouping medium accesses y into frames, with N slots per frame. Within a frame, tags transmit at most once in a randomly selected slot. Thus signal transmitted per tag can have at most one collision within a given frame. Initially, frames were of uniform size with the same number of slots. This was later extended to incorporate flexibility by letting the reader adaptively expand and contract the number of slots per frame in the next upcoming round. The number of slots per frame is selected as per the number of tags in the field. There is no deterministic way to handle this problem of adaptively varying the number of slots per frame at any given point in time. We address this issue in the next section. The framed slotted ALOHA has been proposed as a means to alleviate problems associated with collisions when multiple RFID tags are simultaneously present in a readers field. Almost all of these approaches assume that the reader first transmits its frame size to the tags. The tags then randomly pick a slot and reply in that slot. From the

Fig. 2: An example binary tree

we start consider ing from the root of the tree, the earlier attempts are invariably going to be replete with collisions since about half the tags (assuming that the tree is complete and that there is a tag identifier at every leaf node) would respond for the first bit from the top (of either 0 or 1). Similarly, given the symmetry of this representation, the bottom-most level of the tree would have the same consequence since the number of 0s as 1s is the same. This situation clearly necessitates an intelligent means to address the issue. The proposed method utilizes the density of entries at any given level, and utilizes this information to reduce the number of iterations that are required to completely determine the identity of every tag in the field of the reader.

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Mobile and Pervasive Computing (CoMPC2008)

[4] Girish Khandelwal, Kyonghwan Lee, Aylin Yener and Semih Serbetli. ASAP: A MAC Protocol for Dense and Time-Constrained RFID Systems. In EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 2007. [5] Jihoon Myung and Wonjun Lee. Adaptive Binary Splitting: A RFID Tag Collision Arbitration Protocol for Tag Identification. Mobile Networks and Applications, Vol. 11, pp. 711722, 2006. [6] Selwyn Piramuthu. Adaptive Framework for Collisions in RFID Tag Identification. Journal of Information & Knowledge Management, 7(1), pp. 914, May, 2008. [7] Jae-Dong Shin, Sang-Soo Yeo, Tai-Hoon Kim and Sung Kwon Kim. 2007. Hybrid Tag Anti- Collision Algorithms in RFID Systems. Proceedings of ICCS, Part IV, LNCS 4490, Springer-Verlag, pp. 693700. [8] Y u-Ju Tu and Selwyn Piramuthu. Reducing False reads in RFID-Embedded Supply Chains. Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, 3(2) August 2008. [9] Huang, Xu, and Dat Tran. Adaptive Binary Splitting for a RFID Tag Collision Arbitration via Multi-agent Systems. Proceedings of KES2007/WIRN2007, part III, pringerVerlag, LNAI 4694, pp. 926933, 2007.

CONCLUSIONS
Due to lack of time, we were unable to completely describe the proposed method. We expect to be able to complete this paper within the next week or so, and we intend to re-send the revised document when its completed.

REFERENCES
[1] Wen-Tzu Chen and Guan-Hung Lin. An Efficient AntiCollision Method for Tag Identification in a RFID System. IEICE Transactions on Communications, Vol. E89- B, No. 12, pp. 33863392, December 2006. [2] Christian Floerkemeier. Bayesian Transmission Strategy for Framed ALOHA Based RFID Protocols. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on RFID, pp. 228235, 2007. [3] Christian Floerkemeier and Matthias Wille. Com parison of Transmission Schemes for Framed ALOHA based RFID Protocols. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Applications and the Internet Workshops (SAINT), pp.92 97, 2006.