Probabilistic missing-tag detection and energy-time tradeoff in large-scale RFID systems

Abstract

RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies are poised to revolutionize retail, warehouse and supply chain management. One of their interesting applications is to automatically detect missing tags (and the associated objects) in a large storage space. In order to timely catch any missing event such as theft, the detection operation may have to be performed frequently. Because RFID systems typically work under low-rate channels, past research has focused on reducing execution time of a detection protocol, in order to prevent excessively-long protocol execution from interfering normal inventory operations. However, when active tags are used to provide a large spatial coverage, energy efficiency becomes critical in prolonging the lifetime of these battery-powered tags. Existing literature lacks thorough study on how to conserve energy in the process of missing-tag detection and how to jointly optimize energy efficiency and time efficiency. This paper makes two important contributions: First, we propose a novel protocol design that takes both energy efficiency and time efficiency into consideration. It achieves multi-fold reduction in both energy cost and execution time when comparing with the best existing work. In some cases, the reduction is more than an order of magnitude. Second, we reveal a fundamental energy-time tradeoff in missing-tag detection. Through our analytical framework, we are able to flexibly control the tradeoff through a couple of system parameters in order to achieve desirable performance.