The impact of external interference on RFID anti-collision protocols

Research on RFID has made significant progress in reducing the tag identification time, but almost ignored the concerns related to practical system deployment. RFID tags backscatter to the reader a signal that is weak and subject to interference from any nearby device operating on the same frequency, experiencing significant performance degradation when such condition occurs. This letter provides an analytic model to evaluate the impact of external interference on the main representatives of identification protocols. Results show that nearby interfering devices can reduce the temporal efficiency up to 14%, loosing 10% of tags when the packet error rate is 0.2.