A Communication Protocol and Physical Characteristics Simulator for an RFID Sensor Environment

Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems have been widely used for asset identification in supply chain as well as in many wireless sensor network (WSN) projects, where both identification and location of objects are mandatory activities among other RFID features. This work describes an RFID environment (RFID-Env) simulation software that considers the influence of several environment variables and also both the physical characteristics and the type of electronic identification tags. The main objectives of RFID-Env are: (i) to evaluate the characteristics of a given physical environment, such as both the tag reading and writing speed and also the distance between the interrogator and the tags; (ii) to allow the performance comparison among anti-collision communication protocols, which are ISO standardized used in both UHF RFID 18000-6 and EPCGlobal Gen2 devices - currently being the most used types of RFID tags; (iii) to make the development of new anti-collision algorithms easier.