On the Implementation of a Multi-Reader Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Architecture

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are one of the enabling technologies for the ubiquitous computing paradigm. At the moment, the EPCglobal organization leads the development of industry-driven standards for this field and has settled the EPC "Gen 2" as a reference standard. In this paper, we analyze the anti-collision procedure of EPC "Gen 2" to find the time needed to identify a population of tags, by means of the finite Markov-chain of the system. In addition, a UHF multi-reader prototype based on time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme is evaluated in this work. In this TDMA scheme, the reader time-slot duration is allocated according to the computations obtained from our analytical study. The main conclusions derived from this implementation are summarized in this work.