A fast collision arbitration algorithm for RFID tag identifcation in supply chain environment

Radio Frequency Identification based inventory systems have been massively deployed in supply chain environment for the benefts of fast item identifcation and inventory traceability. As low cost RFID tag is adopted by industries to build their RFID inventory systems, only one shared communication channel is implemented between tags and readers in general. When multiple tags simultaneously respond to an inquiry from the reader, signal collision occurs and another round of inquiry is required for the reader to complete tag identifcation task. To increase inventory efficiency, RFID system requires an efficient anti-collision solution. In this study, a treebased anti-collision protocol, called Octad algorithm, is proposed by introducing a new collision detection method, which can identify up to eight tags in one inquiry round. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms other existing tree-based anti-collision solutions. Depending on various tag densities, our scheme reduces 25% to 48% identifcation delay and 11% to 21% communication overhead.