Performance analysis of RFID Generation-2 protocol

This paper investigates the performance of EPC-gloabl Generation-2 (Gen-2) ultra high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) protocol. Gen-2 protocol has a critical parameter Q that plays an important role in resolving tag collisions. Gen-2 protocol proposes an adaptive slot-count algorithm to adjust Q dynamically based on the type of replies from tags. In this paper, we define two performance metrics for tag identification: Query Success Rate (QSR) and tag identification speed (TIS). We establish a Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC) model for the Gen-2 and accordingly obtain quantitative results of QSR and TIS. Extensive simulations validate our theoretical analysis and demonstrate that the number of tags has little impact on the performance. In other words, QSR and TIS do not nearly decrease even though the number of tags may be increasing. Our model for Gen-2 protocol is also useful to study the performance of other RFID protocols.