TIP: Time-Efficient Identification Protocol for Unknown RFID Tags Using Bloom Filters

Abstract

Unknown tag identification is an important issue in large-scale RFID systems especially in automatic inventory control and asset tracking. Unknown tags refer to the tags, which have entered into the surveillance area, but not been identified by the reader yet. Many protocols have been proposed for unknown tag identification. However, they still suffer from a couple of drawbacks. Firstly, most of them leverage the classical EDFSA protocol in the identification phase, which is considerably time-consuming. Secondly, they do not filter known tags out so that known tags interfered with the unknown tag ID transmission process, especially when the density of known tags is high. To this end, we propose TIP, which is a time-efficient identification protocol for unknown RFID tags using Bloom filter. To avoid the interference of known tags to unknown tags, we employ the bloom filter to deactivate known tags. To make TIP protocol be timeefficient, we introduce an indicator vector for unknown tags so that each unknown tag transmits its ID only once during the holistic identification process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed protocol achieves about 12% up to 74% time reduction during the identification process when the density of unknown tags ranges from 1% to 67%, compared with the existing protocols.