Fair Anti-Collision Protocol in Dense RFID Networks

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a well-known identification technology. Nowadays, applications involving a high number of RFID readers are becoming critical. In such pervasive environments, interferences among readers represent a relevant problem. Many protocols have been proposed to reduce reader-to-reader collisions, with different benefits and drawbacks. An efficient protocol is Neighbor Friendly Reader Anticollision protocol (NFRA), which provides a good throughput. However, this algorithm is based on a random component, potentially advantaging some readers and forcing the others to longer delay time. This paper proposes an approach to guarantee higher fairness, represented by the minimal variance of throughput for every reader. Theoretical results, supported by simulations, demonstrates the achieved improvements.