Adaptive M-ary query tree protocol for the fast RFID tag arbitration

The most challenging issue in radio frequency identification (RFID) is to correctly and quickly recognize a number of tag IDs in the reader's field. Among proposed protocols for this problem, a query tree based protocol guarantees to identify all the tags, where all tag IDs are uniformly distributed. However, in real implements, the beginning part of tag ID is uniquely assigned by the EPCglobal and the remaining part is sequentially given. In this paper, we propose an adaptive M-ary query tree protocol (AMQT), which effectively reduces unnecessary query-response cycles between a reader and tags with the similar tag IDs and provides the fast identification with m-bit arbitration. The simulation results show that the AMQT significantly outperforms other schemes in terms of identification time, identification efficiency and communications overhead.