Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) systems are becoming more and more popular in the field of ubiquitous computing, in particular for objects identification. An RFID system is composed by one or more readers and a number of tags. One of the main issues in an RFID network is the fast and reliable identification of all tags in the reader range. The reader issues some queries, and tags properly answer. Then, the reader must identify the tags from such answers. This is crucial for most applications. Since the transmission medium is shared, the typical problem to be faced is a MAC-like one, i.e. to avoid or limit the number of tags transmission collisions. We propose a protocol which, under some assumptions about transmission techniques, always achieves a 100 perfomance. It is based on a proper recursive splitting of the concurrent tags sets, until all tags have been identified. The other approaches present in literature have performances of about 42 in the average at most. The counterpart is a more sophisticated hardware to be deployed in the manufacture of low cost tags.
In this paper we present a new tree search-based protocol for the anti-collision problem of RFID systems. This protocol builds a binary search tree according to the prefixes chosen randomly by tags rather than using their ID-based prefixes. Therefore, the tag identification time of the proposed protocol is no longer limited by the tag ID distribution and ID length as the conventional tree search protocol. The time complexity of the protocol is derived and shown that it can identify tags faster than the Query-Tree protocol.