Load Balancing for a Multi-Channel Multi-Interface 2.4 GHz Active RFID Reader

Hyun-Sung PARK  Dong-Hyun KIM  Jong-Doek KIM  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E93-B    No.5    pp.1205-1215
Publication Date: 2010/05/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E93.B.1205
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Network Management/Operation
Keyword: 
active RFID,  multi-channel,  multi-interface,  load-balancing,  

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Summary: 
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.