Stability Analysis of an Efficient Anti-Collision Protocol for RFID Tag Identification

A stable and efficient anti-collision protocol is very important for tags identification in many radio frequency identification (RFID) system such as flow productions and automatic controls. In this paper, we introduce an efficient anti-collision protocol named collision tree protocol (CT) and analyze the stability of it in detail. Both theoretical results and experimental results indicate that the performance of CT is only dependent on the number of tags to be identified and not influenced by the distribution of tag IDs and other factors, and the average performance of CT for one-tag identification converges to a constant. According to the definition of the stability of an anti-collision protocol, CT is a stable anti-collision protocol for RFID tag identification. The stability proposed in this paper provides a new performance metric for evaluating the performance of different anti-collision protocols for RFID tag identification. As a stable protocol, the time delay and the power consumption for one-tag identification of CT tend to be constant. Therefore, CT can be applied to various tags identification systems and especially suited to the RFID systems in which both the time delay and the power consumption for tags (or objects) identification are required to be limited and stable.