Distributed Algorithms for The RFID Coverage Problem

We introduce distributed algorithms for the RFID coverage problem, which is defined as finding the minimum amount of RFID readers that cover every tag. The algorithms depends on rounds of writes and reads in/from the tags' memories. The first algorithm, called Greedy Distributed Elimination (GDE), is inspired of, and equivalent to, the greedy approximation algorithm of the set cover problem. Our second contribution is a randomized algorithm that can run in one or more write/read rounds (called RANDOM and RANDOM+). Using concepts concluded from these algorithms, we introduce algorithm GDE-RANDOM+ which improves further the number of non-redundant readers of GDE by integrating it with RANDOM+.