LBTM: Listen-before-Talk Protocol for Multiclass UHF RFID Networks

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is considered one of the pioneering technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). It allows to bind physical environments to information processing systems, adding new capabilities like automatic inventorying, location, or sensing with batteryless tags. Indeed, many data flows of physical objects can be tracked using this technology, and it is common to find heterogeneous traffics present in the same facility, each managed by different sets of readers. For example, in a grocery store, typically we have two kinds of readers: those carrying out a continuous inventory, whose goal is knowing the contents of the shelves as accurately as possible; and a set of checking-out readers at exit gates for the billing process that has to minimize the waiting time of customers. Another example of multiclass traffic is a hospital, where new families of sensing tags allow staff to wirelessly monitor patients—which obviously must be done as a priority—and coexist with other readers aimed at precisely knowing the location of equipment or drugs. Even with the same goal, there could be readers requiring different setups, for example in the hospital case, readers located at doors for inventorying purposes have a short time available to identify passing-by objects or people, and thus they have to work with a higher priority than regular readers performing inventorying tasks. In this work, we investigate a modification of the standard listen-before-talk (LBT) protocol for RFID networks which can support this kind of multipriority environment, by offering different qualities of service to each traffic. Results demonstrate that by tuning the protocol setup, it is possible to establish a trade-off between the performance of each traffic. This is shown for the two cited examples, the grocery shop and the hospital, using a simulation tool allowing us to implement a full-scale RFID model. In addition, we present a greedy mechanism for online reader setup. Instead of selecting offline a hard priority level, this greedy algorithm is able to adapt the priority to achieve the required quality-of-service (QoS) level.