PrIME: Priority-based tag identification in mobile RFID systems

One of the major challenges in mobile RFID systems is the ability to read tags before they leave the system. So far, only a few works have considered tag mobility, targeting specific application scenarios, such as tags placed on a moving conveyor belt. However, many emerging applications involve mobile entities that are free to move so that the set of tags under the reader range is continuously and significantly changing. Such a mobile scenario poses important issues in terms of reliability and timeliness of the reading process. Not only the reader has to estimate the cardinality of the tag population passing through the system, but it has to also timely identify all tags. In this paper we propose PrIME, a new anti-collision protocol for single reader mobile systems. By means of extensive performance evaluation we show that PrIME is able to identify 100% of mobile tags when they follow a pedestrian mobility model, reducing the tag identification delay by over 90% with respect to the most performing solutions available in the literature.