Decoding the collisions in RFID systems

RFID has been gaining popularity due to its variety of applications, such as inventory control and localization. One important issue in RFID system is tag identification. In RFID systems, the tag randomly selects a slot to send a Random Number (RN16) packet to contend for identification. Collision happens when multiple tags select the same slot, which makes the RN packet undecodable and thus reduces the channel utilization. In this paper, we redesign the RN pattern to make the collided RNs decodable. By leveraging the collision slots, the system performance can be dramatically enhanced. This novel scheme is called DDC, which is able to directly decode the collisions without exact knowledge of collided RNs. In the DDC scheme, we modify the RN generator in RFID tag and add a collision decoding scheme for RFID reader. We implement DDC in GNU Radio and USRP2 based testbed to verify its feasibility. Both theoretical analysis and testbed experiment show that DDC achieves 40% tag read rate gain compared with traditional RFID protocol.