Parallel Singulation in RFID Systems

Tag collisions can impose a major delay in radio frequency identification (RFID) systems. Such collisions are hard to overcome with passive tags due to their limited capabilities. In this paper, we look into the problem of minimizing the time required to read a set of passive tags. We propose the novel concept of parallel singulation which, aided by the multiple antennas configuration, interrogates tags in sets. Multiple instances of the anti-collision scheme are executed for each set of tags in parallel and in an autonomous manner. Simulation results show that our approach makes significant improvements in reducing collisions and interrogation delay and thus increasing the reading rate and throughput of RFID systems.