Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 3148: Protocol for Streaming Data from an RFID Sensor Network + (Sensors)

Currently, there is an increasing interest in the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags which incorporate passive or battery-less sensors. These systems are known as computational RFID (CRFID). Several CRFID tags together with a reader set up an RFID sensor network. The reader powers up the tags’ microcontroller and their attached sensor using radio frequency waves, and tags backscatter, not only their EPC code but also the value of those sensors. The current standard for interrogating these CRFID tags is the EPC global Class 1 Generation 2 (EPC C1G2). When several tags are located inside the reader interrogation area, the EPC C1G2 results in very poor performance to obtain sensor data values. To solve this problem, a novel protocol called Sensor Frmed Slotted Aloha (sFSA) for streaming sensor data dealing with the tag collisions is presented. The proposed protocol increases the Sensor Read Rate (SRR), defined as the number of sensor data reads per second, compared to the standard. Additionally, this paper presents a prototype of an RFID sensor network to compare the proposed sFSA with the standard, increasing the SRR by more than five times on average. Additionally, the proposed protocol keeps a constant sensor sampling frequency for a suitable streaming of these tag sensors.