An Efficient Q -Algorithm for RFID Tag Anticollision

Abstract

In large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications, tags are attached to items, and users use a radiofrequency identification (RFID) reader to quickly identify tags and obtain the corresponding item information. Since multiple tags share the same channel to communicate with the reader, when they respond simultaneously, tag collision will occur, and the reader cannot successfully obtain the information from the tag. To cope with the tag collision problem, ultrahigh frequency (UHF) RFID standard EPC G1 Gen2 specifies an anticollision protocol to identify a large number of RFID tags in an efficient way. The $Q$ -algorithm has attracted much more attention as the efficiency of an EPC C1 Gen2-based RFID system can be significantly improved by only a slight adjustment to the algorithm. In this paper, we propose a novel $Q$ -algorithm for RFID tag identification, namely, HTEQ, which optimizes the time efficiency of an EPC C1 Gen2-based RFID system to the utmost limit. Extensive simulations verify that our proposed HTEQ is exceptionally expeditious compared to other algorithms, which promises it to be competitive in large-scale IoT environments.