Design and Analysis of Unequal Missing Protection for the Grouping of RFID Tags

In this paper, we address the issue of unequal missing protection (UMP) for the design of grouping of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. While relying on group generation matrices, grouping of RFID tags allows verifying the integrity of a collection of tags without the requirement for accessing external systems, and can be extended to identify missing tags. Motivated by application needs that call for UMP among the tags, we first introduce the concepts of UMP for grouping of RFID tags and its extended counterpart, with which missing tags with high missing protection levels are more easily counted or identified than those with low missing protection levels. We then present simple yet effective schemes to realize grouping of RFID tags with UMP and its extended counterpart. The proposed schemes not only can easily fulfill the requirement of UMP among the tags, but also offer flexibility in constructing UMP group generation matrices. We also characterize key objects in order to further study grouping of RFID tags with UMP and its extended counterpart, called consistent and unidentifiable sets, respectively. This characterization in turn enables theoretical analysis of the error rate from the perspective of a tag. Theoretical and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficiencies of the proposed schemes for the design of grouping of RFID tags with UMP.