A Multi-channel Based Reader Anti-collision Protocol for Dense RFID Environments

With the recent developments in Internet of things, RFID is getting more and more attention. In the dense RFID environment, reader collision occurs when some readers potentially interfere with the operation of others, and cannot correctly communicate with tags, which will limit the performance of RFID system. As we know, the tag collision has been widely discussed, but the reader collision has not received as much attention in the past few years. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-channel based reader anti-collision protocol (MRAP), which is suitable for dense RFID environments, to solve the reader collision problem. Based on the connected matrix and the distance between any two readers, we design the principle to confirm channel and communication timeslot for each reader. Using multi-channel, a new communication process is generated, in which the irrelevant readers can communicate with tags simultaneously, even in the same channel. The simulation and performance analysis results show that our protocol can achieve better performances than previous protocols in enhancing system throughput and system efficiency.