RFID based networks

In this article, we outline a research agenda for developing protocols and algorithms for densely populated RFID based systems covering a wide geographic area. This will need multiple readers collaborating to read RFID tag data. We consider cases where the tag data is used for identification, or for sensing environmental parameters. We address performance issues related to accuracy and efficiency in such systems by exploiting diversity and redundancy. We discuss how tag multiplicity can be used to improve accuracy. In a similar fashion, we explore how reader diversity, achieved by using multiple readers with potentially partially overlapping coverage areas, can be exploited to improve accuracy and efficiency. Finally, we show how multiple antennas in a reader can be used to improve accuracy and access rates by utilizing antenna diversity. RFID tag/sensor data can be highly redundant for the purpose of answering a higher level query. For example, often the higher level query needs to compute a statistic or a function on the sensory data obtained by the RFID sensors, and does not need all the individual sensor readings. We outline the need for efficient tag-to-reader communication, and reader-to-reader coordination effectively to compute such functions at low overhead.