Research on anti-reader collision protocols for integrated RFID-WSNs

Integrated RFID-WSNs (wireless sensor networks) have recently been researched to provide object identities, sensing information, mobile service, and network functionalities. In integrated RFID-WSNs, the reader collision is one of the critical problems. Above all, due to the absence of universally applicable anti-collision protocols and the channel capture phenomenon, the medium access control protocols in integrated RFID-WSNs suffer from reader collision and starvation problems. In this paper, we propose an efficient MAC protocol, called EMP, to avoid the above problems in integrated RFID-WSNs. EMP is a CSMA-based MAC protocol which is compatible with sensor networks operating on integrated nodes which consist of an RFID reader and a senor node. EMP resolves not only the reader collision problem, but also the starvation problem using a power control mechanism. To verify the performance of EMP, we compared it with other anti-reader collision MAC protocols using simulations. As a result, the performance of EMP showed improvements in throughput, system efficiency, and energy consumption compared to the single data channel protocols (CSMA/CA, Pulse, and DiCa) in dense deployment environments.