Comparison of energy consumption for reader anti-collision protocols in dense RFID networks

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is known as a universal technology and has been in the center of attention in the past few years. Readers and tags constitute the main parts of an RFID system. Similar to other wireless devices, RFID readers are confronted with the critical problem of collision. This is because in some applications, numerous readers are spread out densely and are attempting to attain the same tags simultaneously. Collisions are classified to reader-to-reader and reader-to-tag collisions. Both of these collisions may decrease the system’s throughput and performance, or even result in the consumption of a considerable amount of energy. Many various anti-collision protocols have been proposed to avoid these collisions, but there are only a few researches concerning their energy efficiency. While this paper will look at the main reader anti-collision protocols, it will also demonstrate the evaluation results of their energy efficiency via experimental simulations in similar circumstances. The obtained results can help in choosing the most efficient anti-collision protocol in applications like using mobile readers or combining RFIDs with WSN networks which have energy-consuming constraints.