Sidewalk: A RFID tag anti-collision algorithm exploiting sequential arrangements of tags

Although predicting the RFID tag distribution before a read cycle begins would be generally difficult and even futile, a likely and interesting scenario is where the tags have a sequential arrangement. In large-scale applications such as supply chain management, for instance, hundreds or thousands of the same type of product made by the same manufacturer can be stacked together in the stock. In this paper, we propose a simple RFID tag anti-collision algorithm that exploits such sequential structure of the given tag space to achieve a higher read efficiency. The proposed algorithm is also designed to still achieve the level of performance comparable to that of existing algorithms if tags exhibit little sequential structure. Through exhaustive simulations over various tag distributions, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves at least 10% improvement even in the worst case (i.e., when tags are completely randomly distributed), but yields significantly higher improvement when the number of tags and/or the correlation increases.