Towards a new paradigm for RFID identification: Should we cluster RFID tags or not?

Tag identification is one of the key issues affecting the performance of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID). During the last years, there has been a trend to modify the identification paradigm for RFID by replacing the centralized approach with a distributed one. However, these new approaches lack of efficient protocols to identify RFID tags. The difficulty of implementing identification protocols for the new paradigms grows when trying to adapt the existing standards for RFID to such approaches. In this paper, we analyze the implications of implementing the EPC Class 1 Gen 2 (EPC Gen 2) standard in a distributed manner. First, we study a distributed protocol for RFID identification recently proposed in the literature and find that the distributed concept vanishes during the communication between a newly proposed device and the reader, which degrades the network performance. Additionally, regarding the new paradigm for RFID identification we find that it is easier to adapt the operation of tree-based protocols than the ALOHA-based ones. Finally, we provide in this work the baseline for the design of ALOHA-based medium access protocols for distributed RFID identification and the requirements needed to perform the identification process in a faster way.