Efficient unknown tag identification protocols in large-scale RFID systems

Owing to its attractive features such as fast identification and relatively long interrogating range over the classical barcode systems, radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology possesses a promising prospect in many practical applications such as inventory control and supply chain management. However, unknown tags appear in RFID systems when the tagged objects are misplaced or unregistered tagged objects are moved in, which often causes huge economic losses. This paper addresses an important and challenging problem of unknown tag identification in large-scale RFID systems. The existing protocols leverage the Aloha-like schemes to distinguish the unknown tags from known tags at the slot level, which are of low time-efficiency, and thus can hardly satisfy the delay-sensitive applications. To fill in this gap, two filtering-based protocols (at the bit level) are proposed in this paper to address the problem of unknown tag identification efficiently. Theoretical analysis of the protocol parameters is performed to minimize the execution time of the proposed protocols. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the protocols. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocols significantly outperform the currently most promising protocols.