Performance evaluation of RFID tag-based “virtual” communication channels

The widespread deployment of RFID technology and EPCglobal compliant devices paved the way for research activities on unconventional uses of RFID, beyond the mere identification of people and goods. Focus of this paper is on a recent proposal of passive RFID tags exploitation, in particular their data storage capacity, as a new “virtual” communication channel to exchange data within piconets of RFID readers. Although earlier researches already demonstrated the great potential of this paradigm, still an analytical model for the channel performance evaluation is lacking. The model we propose in this paper, to evaluate goodput and delay over the RFID channel, considers aspects like collisions and tag memory management problems. The trustworthiness of the obtained analytical results is also validated through a simulative campaign. The study definitely helps in (i) defining data transfer rates as a function of number of readers and storage capacity of available tags, and (ii) finding the number of readers that can be served while satisfying goodput and traffic delay constraints.