Fast physical-layer unknown tag identification in large-scale RFID systems

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology brings a revolutionary change in warehouse management by automatically monitoring and tracking. Considering the misplaced and newly added tags, fast identifying such unknown tags is of paramount importance, especially in large-scale RFID systems. Unlike existing work, this paper proposes a fast Physical-layer Unknown Tag Identification (PUTI) protocol that gathers intact unknown tag set with high identification efficiency. PUTI utilizes physical layer aggregated signals to separate all unknown tags from known tags and then collects IDs from only the entire unknown tag set. We also optimize the parameter setting and analyze protocol performance in theory. Simulation results show that PUTI outperforms prior unknown tag identification protocols. For example, given a RFID system with 1,000 unknown tags and 10,000 known tags, PUTI represents reduction of 37.7% when compared with the state-of-the-art protocol.