Fast RFID polling protocols

Abstract

Polling is a widely used anti-collision protocol that interrogates RFID tags in a request-response way. In conventional polling, the reader needs to broadcast 96-bit tag IDs to separate each tag from others, leading to long interrogation delay. This paper takes the first step to design fast polling protocols by shortening the polling vector. We first propose an efficient Hash Polling Protocol (HPP) that uses hash indices rather than tag IDs as the polling vector to query each tag. The length of the polling vector is dropped from 96 bits to no more than log(n) bits (n is the number of tags). We then enhance HPP (EHPP) to make it not only more efficient but also more steady with respect to the number of tags. To avoid redundant transmissions in both HPP and EHPP, we finally propose a Tree-based Polling Protocol (TPP) that reserves the invariant portion of the polling vector while updates only the discrepancy by constructing and broadcasting a polling tree. Theoretical analysis shows that the average length of the polling vector in TPP levels off at only 3.44, 28 times less than 96-bit tag IDs. We also apply our protocols to collect tag information and simulation results demonstrate that our best protocol TPP outperforms the state-of-the-art information collection protocol.