RFID Network Scheduling Using a Discrete Multi-swarm Optimizer

Abstract

The operation of RFID systems often involves a situation in which multiple readers physically located near one another may interfere with one another's operation. Such reader collision must be minimized to avoid the faulty or miss reads. Specifically, scheduling the colliding RFID readers to reduce the total system transaction time or response time is the challenging problem for large-scale RFID network deployment. This paper, therefore, aims to use a successful multi-swarm cooperative optimizer called PS2O to minimize both the reader-to-reader interference and total system transaction time in RFID reader networks. The main idea of PS2O is to extend the single population PSO to the interacting multi-swarms model by constructing hierarchical interaction topology and enhanced dynamical update equations. As the RFID network scheduling model formulated in this work is a discrete problem, a binary version of PS2O algorithm is proposed in this study. Numerical results for four test cases with different scales, which ranging from 30 readers to 200 readers, have been presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methodology.