Efficient Protocols for Collecting Histograms in Large-Scale RFID Systems

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Collecting histograms over RFID tags is an essential premise for effective aggregate queries and analysis in large-scale RFID-based applications. In this paper we consider an efficient collection of histograms from the massive number of RFID tags, without the need to read all tag data. In order to achieve time efficiency, we propose a novel, ensemble sampling-based method to simultaneously estimate the tag size for a number of categories. We first consider the problem of basic histogram collection, and propose an efficient algorithm based on the idea of ensemble sampling. We further consider the problems of advanced histogram collection, respectively, with an iceberg query and a top- $k$ query. Efficient algorithms are proposed to tackle the above problems such that the qualified/unqualified categories can be quickly identified. This ensemble sampling-based framework is very flexible and compatible to current tag-counting estimators, which can be efficiently leveraged to estimate the tag size for each category. Experiment results indicate that our ensemble sampling-based solutions can achieve a much better performance than the basic estimation/identification schemes.