Trade-off between maximum cardinality of collision sets and accuracy of RFID reader-to-reader collision detection

As the adoption of the radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology is increasing, many applications require a dense reader deployment. In such environments, reader-to-reader interference becomes a critical problem, so the proposal of effective anti-collision algorithms and their analysis are particularly important. Existing reader-to-reader anti-collision algorithms are typically analyzed using single interference models that consider only direct collisions. The additive interference models, which consider the sum of interferences, are more accurate but require more computational effort. The goal of this paper is to find the difference in accuracy between single and additive interference models and how many interference components should be considered in additive models. An in-depth analysis evaluates to which extent the number of the additive components in a possible collision affects the accuracy of collision detection. The results of the investigation shows that an analysis limited to direct collisions cannot reach a satisfactory accuracy, but the collisions generated by the addition of the interferences from a large number of readers do not affect significantly the detection of RFID reader-to-reader collisions