DiCa: Distributed tag access with collision-avoidance among mobile RFID readers

Advances in wireless and mobile communication technologies have enabled the development of various RFID-based systems and applications in addition to the extension of the tag reading range of mobile readers. Thus, it has become commonplace that multiple readers concurrently attempt to read tags within ranges of the readers. However, this concurrent access among multiple mobile readers brings about a new problem called reader collision, where a reader's transmission is interfered by other readers. There have been several studies focusing on solving the reader collision problem. These studies employ time division, frequency division, space division, or the centralized scheduling approach. In this paper, a cooperative, distributed reader collision avoidance algorithm is introduced. In particular, the proposed DiCa (Distributed Tag Access with Collision-Avoidance) is considerably suitable for energy-efficient wireless mobile network environments cooperated with RFID, since the DiCa is capable not only of avoiding collisions, but also changing power states autonomously through simple interaction of adjacent readers.