Tree Protocols for RFID Tags with Generalized Arbitration Spaces

The radio frequency identification (RFID) systems are exhibiting an immense growth and ubiquity. In future there will be a large number of RFID tags attached to objects and persons and dense deployment of the RFID readers, which will be interconnected in reader networks. The performance of the reading of such large volumes of tags requires efficient arbitration protocols for resolving the collisions among the tags that attempt to send information to the reader network. In this paper we introduce a framework for arbitration protocols that makes provisions for cooperative arbitration performed by the network of readers. We introduce the notion of arbitration space, which is a generalization of the recently recently introduced framework for collision resolution with running multiplicity estimation. The usefulness of the concept of arbitration space is illustrated through several examples. The presented ideas on generalized arbitration space set interesting directions for future work.