A novel simulator for RFID reader-to-reader anti-collision protocols

Reader-to-reader interference affects the simultaneous activity of the readers in an RFID system: the collisions among the readers penalize the throughput and the reliability of the application. Many reader-to-reader anti-collision protocols have been proposed to address this issue. Their performance is generally evaluated by means of simulations. For this purpose, a generic simulator of wireless networks is exploited in most of the cases. This paper proposes a novel simulator, which is customized to the characteristics of the RFID technology in order to speed up the evaluation of anti-collision protocols. The simulator is based on OMNeT++ and it adds new ad-hoc facilities, such as the implementation of the existing reader-to-reader anti-collision protocols and a modular architecture for rapidly developing and testing new ones.