A Fast Collision Arbitration Algorithm for RFID Tag Identification in Supply Chain Environment

Radio Frequency Identification based inventory systems have been massively deployed in supply chain environment for the benefits of fast item identification and inventory traceability. As low cost RFID tag is adopted by industries to build their RFID inventory systems, only one shared communication channel is implemented between tags and readers in general. When multiple tags simultaneously respond to an inquiry from the reader, signal collision occurs and another round of inquiry is required for the reader to complete tag identification task. To increase inventory efficiency, RFID system requires an efficient anti-collision solution. In this study, a tree based anti-collision protocol, called Octad algorithm, is proposed by introducing a new collision detection method, which can identify up to eight tags in one inquiry round. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms other existing tree-based anti-collision solutions. Depending on various tag densities, our scheme reduces 25% to 48% identification delay and 11% to 21% communication overhead.