CARRE: Cellular automaton based redundant readers elimination in RFID networks

Redundant readers elimination is one of the fundamental optimization research problems in RFID networks. The problem is NP-hard and can be solved approximately using best known centralized set cover algorithms. However, either distributed or localized solutions for this problem are much more realistic and useful in practice. Different distributed and a few local algorithms are known in the literature. In this paper, we propose a cellular automaton based local algorithm for the redundant readers elimination optimization problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first cellular automaton based algorithm (that is, a strictly local algorithm) to solve this problem. We compare the performance of our algorithm with other local algorithms and establish that our algorithm gives much better results. We also compare our algorithm with the best known centralized approximation algorithm and find very competitive results even though our algorithm is a local one.