Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology that uses radio frequency signals to identify objects. RFID is one of the key technologies used by the Internet of Things (IoT). This technology enables communication between the main devices used in RFID, the reader and the tags. The tags share a communication channel. Therefore, if several tags attempt to send information at the same time, the reader will be unable to distinguish these signals. This is called the tag collision problem. This results in an increased time necessary for system identification and energy consumption. To minimize tag collisions, RFID readers must use an anti-collision protocol. Different types of anti-collision protocols have been proposed in the literature in order to solve this problem. This paper provides an update including some of the most relevant anti-collision protocols.

In recent years, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has become very popular. The main feature of this technology is that RFID tags do not require close handling and no line of sight is required between the reader and the tags. RFID is a technology that uses radio frequencies in order to identify tags, which do not need to be positioned accurately relative to the reader. Tags share the communication channel, increasing the likelihood of causing a problem, viz., a message collision. Tree based protocols can resolve these collisions, but require a uniform tag ID distribution. This means they are very dependent of the distribution of the IDs of the tags. Tag IDs are written in the tag and contain a predefined bit string of data. A study of the influence of the tag ID distribution on the protocols’ behaviour is proposed here. A new protocol, called the Flexible Query window Tree (FQwT) is presented to estimate the tag ID distribution, taking into consideration the type of distribution. The aim is to create a flexible anti-collision protocol in order to identify a set of tags that constitute an ID distribution. As a result, the reader classifies tags into groups determined by using a distribution estimator. Simulations show that the FQwT protocol contributes to significant reductions in identification time and energy consumption regardless of the type of ID distribution.

One of the main existing problems in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is the tag collision problem. When several tags try to respond to the reader under the coverage of the same reader antenna their messages collide, degrading bandwidth and increasing the number of transmitted bits. An anticollision protocol, based on the classical Binary Tree (BT) protocol, with the ability to decrease the number of bits transmitted by the reader and the tags, is proposed here. Simulations results show that the proposed protocol increases the throughput with respect to other recent state-of-the-art protocols while keeping a low energy consumption of a passive RFID system.

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Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is undergoing a remarkable development in the last few years. In this technology, identification information is exchanged between two devices: readers and tags. If two tags attempt to transmit simultaneously, a collision is produced. This phenomena, known as the tag collision problem, is becoming increasingly important, since it leads to an increase in the number of reader transmitted bits and identification delay, in addition to a wastage of energy and bandwidth. In this context, protocols based on the EPCglobal Class-1 Generation-2 (EPC C1G2) standard arbitrate collisions by adjusting the transmission frame size. The standard presents an uncertainty in the selection of the frame size, since it does not specify the exact value. This has led to many different alternatives. This paper presents a hardware analysis of the most relevant anti-collision protocols which deal with this uncertainty. The focus of this analysis is to design and evaluate with VHDL the tag's chip design in order to extract the number clock cycles a tag employs to be identified.