Fast and Reliable Tag Estimation in RFID Systems with Collision-Oblivious Reader

Many RFID systems use dynamic slotted ALOHA to identify the label information of the RFID tags. One of the key problems in the RFID system is how to estimate the number of RFID tags up to the desired level of accuracy. In this paper, we present the framework of tag estimation algorithm for the collision-oblivious (CO) reader which can only decide whether the tag response is successful or not. Thus, the CO reader must rely on the success estimator to predict the RFID tag population. We propose two estimation algorithms to predict the number of RFID tags, named the memoryless success estimator (MSE) and the intersection-based success estimator (ISE). The MSE considers only the estimate obtained at the current inventory round, while the ISE finds an appropriate intersection interval of the existing estimates collected at every inventory round. Through the simulation results, we demonstrate that the ISE is a fast, accurate, and controllable estimator whose performance is close to that of the collision/idle estimators.