A practical implementation of ternary query tree for RFID tag anti-collision

A tag-collision problem (or missed reads) in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system is the event that a reader cannot identify the tag if many tags respond to a reader at the same time. The so-called M-ary (M=2, 4, 8, ...) query tree protocols were proposed for tag collision arbitration. Mathys et al. showed that ternary (M=3) query tree will bring about the optimum performance for tag identification. However, a ternary tree is impossible in the query tree protocol. In this paper, we propose a practical implementation of a ternary query tree (TQT) for identifying a binary EPC. Simulation results reveal our TQT outperforms the M-ary query tree.