Scalable trajectory-based protocol for RFID tags identification

RFID systems allow the fast and automatic identification of items through a wireless channel. Items' information like name, model, purpose, and expiration date can be easily stored and retrieved from RFID tags attached to items. Consequently, in the near future, RFID tags might be an active part of our every-day life when interacting with items around us. However, important security and privacy concerns arise from the wireless nature of this technology because tags are resource-constrained devices that respond to any reader interrogation. Although these concerns have been successfully faced by symmetric cryptography schemes, managing a large number of tags is still cumbersome. Therefore, application-dependant solutions seem to be better for the secure, private and efficient identification of tags. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for the fast identification of tags based on readers strategically distributed throughout the system. Using the spatial location of tags, our scheme is able to expedite the identification of tags regardless of the identification protocol used. Furthermore, differently to previous proposals, our scheme is flexible and adaptable to any scenario and to any movement's pattern of tags.