A Survey and Tutorial of RFID Anti-Collision Protocols

RFID technologies have revolutionized the asset tracking industry, with applications ranging from automated checkout to monitoring the medication intakes of elderlies. In all these applications, fast, and in some cases energy efficient, tag reading is desirable, especially with increasing tag numbers. In practice, tag reading protocols face many problems. A key one being tag collision, which occurs when multiple tags reply simultaneously to a reader. As a result, an RFID reader experiences low tag reading performance, and wastes valuable energy. Therefore, it is important that RFID application developers are aware of current tag reading protocols. To this end, this paper surveys, classifies, and compares state-of-the-art tag reading protocols. Moreover, it presents research directions for existing and future tag reading protocols.