An EPC class-1 generation-2 anti-collision protocol for RFID tag identification in augmented systems

RFID is one of the most pervasive technologies in contemporary societies. Modern RFID applications require efficient tag identification mechanisms to improve performance. Recently, a new approach has arisen to enhance the identification process in an RFID network. This new approach considers the inclusion of an additional device in the RFID network, which leads to an augmented RFID system. Up to date, the are only few proposals taking such approach into account, being the most interesting those that extend the interrogation zone of an RFID reader. However, the performance of such proposals has not been evaluated yet. In this paper, we review an augmented RFID system to evaluate its performance and study its advantages and limitations. Moreover, we design an anti-collision protocol for such system taking advantage of such features. Our proposed protocol is EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard compliant. We evaluate an augmented RFID system along with our proposal in terms of identification delay to find that it is able to highly reduce such parameter, with gains of up to 40% when compared with a well known multi-reader scheme.