FINDERS: A Featherlight Information Network With Delay-Endurable RFID Support

In this paper, we investigate the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) gear for wireless sensor network construction, aiming to find events of interest and gather aggregate information. In particular, we develop a featherlight information network with delay-endurable RFID support (FINDERS), composed of passive RFID tags that are ultralight, durable, and flexible, without power supply for long-lasting applications. FINDERS faces unprecedented challenges in communication and networking due to its sporadic wireless links, unique asymmetric communication paradigm, intermittent computation capability, and extremely small memory of tags. Several effective techniques are proposed to address these challenges, arriving at an efficient communication protocol for FINDERS. A prototype system is developed, and test-bed experiments are carried out with 38 participants and for 9 days, yielding interesting experimental results that offer valuable insights into RFID-based delay-tolerant networks and provide useful practical guidance for the setup of FINDERS systems.