Design and Analysis of Framed Aloha Based RFID Anti-Collision Algorithms

The anti-collision mechanism is a very important part in RFID systems. Among all the algorithms, the Framed Aloha based (FA) ones are most widely used due to its simplicity and robustness. Previous works mainly focused on the tag population estimation, but determined the reading strategy based on the classical results of Random Access (RA) systems. We show that a new theory is needed for the optimization of the RFID systems as they have characteristics very different from the RA systems. We model the reading process as a Markov Chain and derive the optimal reading strategy through first-passage-time analysis. We show that the optimal strategy can be easily incorporated into the EPCglobal standards to give significant performance improvement.