A Parallel Identification Protocol for RFID systems

Nowadays, RFID systems have been widely deployed for applications such as supply chain management and inventory control. One of their most essential operations is to swiftly identify individual tags to distinguish their associated objects. Most existing solutions identify tags sequentially in the temporal dimension to avoid signal collisions, whose performance degrades significantly as the system scale increases. In this paper, we propose a Parallel Identification Protocol (PIP) for RFID systems, which achieves the parallel identification paradigm and is compatible with current RFID devices. Uniquely, PIP encodes the tag ID into a specially designed pattern and thus greatly facilitates the reader to correctly and effectively recover them from collisions. Furthermore, we analytically investigate its performance and provide guidance on determining its optimal settings. Extensive simulations show that PIP reduces the identification delay by about 25%-50% when compared with the standard method in EPC C1G2 and the state-of-the-art solutions.