Tag Count Frame Slotted Aloha: A Novel Anti-Collision Protocol in RFID Systems

The operation of RFID systems often involves a situation in which multiple tags are present in the read range of a single reader at the same time. The reader performs identification processes repeatedly for object count, tracking or monitoring. In these scenarios, the mobility of tags is low and a large majority of tags identified in the preceding identification process stay. This paper presents a tag count frame slotted Aloha (TCFSA) protocol which is an improvement on the Frame Slotted Aloha. To reduce collisions and identify tags efficiently, TCFSA use information which is obtained from the last process of tag identification. Our performance evaluation shows that TCFSA causes shorter identification delay than existing Aloha based tag anti-collision protocols.