How to improve CSMA-based MAC protocol for dense RFID reader-to-reader Networks?

International audienceDue to the dedicated short range communication feature of passive radio frequency identification (RFID) and the closest proximity operation of both tags and readers in a large-scale dynamic RFID system, when nearby readers simultaneously try to communicate with tags located within their interrogation range, serious interference problems may occur. Such interferences may cause signal collisions that lead to the reading throughput barrier and degrade the system performance. Although many efforts have been done to maximize the throughput by proposing protocols such as NFRA or more recently GDRA, which is compliant with the EPCglobal and ETSI EN 302 208 standards. However, the above protocols are based on unrealistic assumptions or require additional components with more control packet and perform worse in terms of collisions and latency, etc. In this paper, we explore the use of some well-known Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) backoff algorithms to improve the existing CSMA-based reader-to-reader anti-collision protocol in dense RFID networks. Moreover, the proposals are compliant with the existing standards. We conduct extensive simulations and compare their performance with the well-known state-of-the-art protocols to show their performance under various criteria. We find that the proposals improvement are highly suitable for maximizing the throughput, efficiency and for minimizing both the collisions and coverage latency in dense RFID Systems