A Lower Bound on the Average Identification Time in a Passive RFID System

One of the most well-known standards for radio frequency identification (RFID), the standard ISO 18000-6C, collects the requirements for RFID readers and tags and regulates respective communication protocols. In particular, the standard introduces the so-called Q-algorithm resolving conflicts in the channel (which occur when several RFID tags respond simultaneously). As of today, a vast amount of existing literature addresses various modifications of the Q-algorithm; however, none of them is known to significantly reduce the average identification time (i.e., the time to identify all proximate tags). In this work, we derive a lower bound for the average identification time in an RFID system. Furthermore, we demonstrate that in case of an error-free channel, the performance of the legacy Q-algorithm is reasonably close to the proposed lower bound; however, for the error-prone environment, this gap may substantially increase, thereby indicating the need for new identification algorithms. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018.