The tag collection algorithm in ISO/IEC 18000-7 has difficulty in collecting data from massive numbers of active RFID tags in a timely manner, so it should be improved to allow successful application in a wide variety of industrial fields. We propose two novel methods, a reduced-message method to improve the performance of data-tag collection and an efficient-sleep method to improve the performance of ID-tag collection. The reduced-message method decreases the slot size for a tag response by reducing the response size from the tag and reduces the number of commands issued from the reader. The efficient-sleep method utilizes redundant empty slots within the frame period to transmit sleep commands to the tags collected previously. We evaluated the performance improvement of tag collection by the proposed methods experimentally using an active RFID reader and 60 tags that we prepared for this study. The experimental results showed that the reduced-message method and the efficient-sleep method decreased the average tag collection time by 16.7% for data-tag collection and 9.3% for ID-tag collection compared with the standard tag collection. We also developed a simulation model for the active RFID system, reflecting the capture effect in wireless communication, and performed simulations to evaluate the proposed methods with a massive number of tags. The simulation results with up to 300 tags confirmed that the proposed methods could improve the tag collection performance, confirming the experimental results, even with larger numbers of tags.

ISO/IEC 18000-7 Active RFID standard, a single channel system operating at 433 MHz, faces technical difficulties in supporting some recently introduced application demands because of its low transmission rates and vulnerability to radio interference between the readers. We propose a new multi-channel active RFID system operating at the 2.4 GHz band. The special feature of the proposed system is that a reader makes use of multiple interfaces to improve its performance. However, if only a small part of the interfaces is actually used, the performance improvement would not meet expectations. To overcome this problem, a multi-channel multi-interface active RFID protocol that balances the loads among all available interfaces is necessary. Three protocols, "Aggregated," "LP-Combined" and "AP-Balanced" are proposed in this paper. We carry out simulations to compare them under various conditions by changing numbers of tags, numbers of interfaces and tag data size. The AP-Balanced shows the best and the most stable performance and its performance increases almost linearly in proportion to the number of interfaces, which meets our expectation.

Tracking a large quantity of moving target tags simultaneously is essential for the localization and guidance of people in welfare facilities like hospitals and sanatoriums for the aged. The locating system using active RFID technology consists of a number of fixed RFID readers and tags carried by the target objects, or senior people. We compare the performances of several determination algorithms which use the power measurement of received signals emitted by the moving active RFID tags. This letter presents a study on the effect of collision in tracking large quantities of objects based on active RFID real time location system (RTLS). Traditional trilateration, fingerprinting, and well-known LANDMARC algorithm are evaluated and compared with varying number of moving tags through the SystemC-based computer simulation. From the simulation, we show the tradeoff relationship between the number of moving tags and estimation accuracy.