Dual‐reader wireless protocols for dense active RFID identification

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) becomes increasingly widespread in various applications. However, data collision is one of the most concerns in dense active RFID systems. Data collision will cause serious data loss, slow identification speed and high energy consumption. In this paper, data collision problem is addressed and two communication protocols are presented based on the dual‐reader structure. One is the master–slave dual‐reader (MSDR) protocol, and the other is called the dual‐reader DCMA (DRDCMA) protocol. Both protocols are implemented in the hardware platform and their performances are compared with other conventional anti‐collision protocols. Experimental results show that our proposed protocols outperform the conventional ones in terms of identification rate, identification speed and energy consumption. Compared to the Single‐reader (SR) protocol, the proposed MSDR protocol can improve the identification rate by 82.9%, reduce the access latency and energy consumption by 47.0%. Besides, the proposed DRDCMA protocol can reduce the access latency and energy consumption by 69.1 and 78.3%, respectively, in comparison with DCMA. Moreover, MSDR has the fastest identification speed and it can improve nearly 100% over SR when the communication load is large enough. DRDCMA presents the highest identification rate with nearly no data loss, while the identification rate in MSDR is 40.6% and decreases dramatically with the increment in communication load. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.