Reader Activation Scheduling in Multi-reader RFID Systems: A Study of General Case

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology where a reader device can "sense'' the presence of a close by object by reading a tag device attached to the object. To guarantee the coverage quality, multiple RFID readers can be deployed in the given region. In this paper, we consider the problem of activation schedule for readers in a multi-reader environment. In particular, we try to design a schedule for readers to maximize the number of served tags per time-slot while avoiding various interferences. We first develop a centralized algorithm under the assumption that different readers may have different interference and interrogation radius. Next, we propose a novel algorithm which does not need any location information of the readers. Finally, we extend the previous algorithm in distributed manner in order to suit the case where no central entity exists. We conduct extensive simulations to study the performances of our proposed algorithm. And our evaluation results corroborate our theoretical analysis.