A Comparative Study on the Performance of the RFID Tag Collision Resolution Protocols

One of the key issues that affect the universal application of RFID system is the collision caused by that multiple tags try to transmit their data simultaneously through the air interface. Although frame slot ALOHA based and splitting tree based collision resolution protocols are widely adopted, for the resolution of different number of tags, these protocols and their variants perform differently. The performance evaluation and comparison of these protocols are seldom researched and reported. In this paper, the time and message complexity of some typical collision resolution protocols are evaluated and compared through theoretical analysis and computation. Results indicate that the splitting tree based protocols, especially the k-ary tree protocol, perform much better than the frame slot ALOHA protocols, and it is difficult for the frame slot ALOHA protocols to resolve the collision happened in dense RFID tag environment.