Inducing Collisions for Fast RFID Tag Identification

Efficient tag reading is one of the major challenges in RFID systems. So far, most of the literature has assumed that interference is intrinsically harmful and must be avoided. For this reason, prior work aims at singulating tag transmissions in order to prevent collisions. In this letter we adopt the opposite approach: Rather than working against interference, we embrace the collision of radio waves. We propose a new protocol, called TIANC, which uses multiple antennas and analog network coding (ANC) to recover the original tag transmissions. Performance analysis shows that TIANC achieves substantial speed improvement, performing up to 2.3 times faster than previously proposed mechanisms.