Dynamic Frame Update Policy for UHF RFID Sensor Tag Collisions

The current growing demand for low-cost edge devices to bridge the physical–digital divide has triggered the growing scope of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology research. Besides object identification, researchers have also examined the possibility of using RFID tags for low-power wireless sensing, localisation and activity inference. This paper focuses on passive UHF RFID sensing. An RFID system consists of a reader and various numbers of tags, which can incorporate different kinds of sensors. These sensor tags require fast anti-collision protocols to minimise the number of collisions with the other tags sharing the reader’s interrogation zone. Therefore, RFID application developers must be mindful of anti-collision protocols. Dynamic Frame Slotted Aloha (DFSA) anti-collision protocols have been used extensively in the literature because EPCglobal Class 1 Generation 2 (EPC C1G2), which is the current communication protocol standard in RFID, employs this strategy. Protocols under this category are distinguished by their policy for updating the transmission frame size. This paper analyses the frame size update policy of DFSA strategies to survey and classify the main state-of-the-art of DFSA protocols according to their policy. Consequently, this paper proposes a novel policy to lower the time to read one sensor data packet compared to existing strategies. Next, the novel anti-collision protocol Fuzzy Frame Slotted Aloha (FFSA) is presented, which applies this novel DFSA policy. The results of our simulation confirm that FFSA significantly decreases the sensor tag read time for a wide range of tag populations when compared to earlier DFSA protocols thanks to the proposed frame size update policy.