Finding Needles in a Haystack: Missing Tag Detection in Large RFID Systems

Abstract

Radio frequency identification technology has been widely used in missing tag detection to reduce and avoid inventory shrinkage. In this application, promptly finding out the missing event is of paramount importance. However, the existing missing tag detection protocols cannot efficiently handle the presence of a large number of unexpected tags whose IDs are not known to the reader, which shackles the time efficiency. To deal with the problem of detecting missing tags in the presence of unexpected tags, this paper introduces a two-phase Bloom filter-based missing tag detection (BMTD) protocol. The proposed BMTD exploits Bloom filter in sequence to first deactivate the unexpected tags and then test the membership of the expected tags, thus dampening the interference from the unexpected tags and considerably reducing the detection time. Moreover, the theoretical analysis of the protocol parameters is performed to minimize the detection time of the proposed BMTD and achieve the required reliability simultaneously. In addition, we derive a critical threshold on the unexpected tag size for the execution of first phase in BMTD. Extensive experiments are then conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed BMTD. The results demonstrate that the proposed BMTD significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions.