Computation-Communication Tradeoffs for Missing Multitagged Item Detection in RFID Networks

Missing item event detection is one of the most important radio-frequency identification (RFID)-enabled functions. Yet it is largely unaddressed how to fast and reliably detect missing item event in multitagged RFID systems where multiple tags are tagged on one item. The canonical methods can only solve tag-level detection problem where each item is associated with one tag, and applying them to detect the missing multitagged items would falsely alarm and is time inefficient. To bridge the gap, this article formulates and analyzes the missing multitagged item detection problem. Our key idea is to search the proper seeds so that the reader only needs to probe a subset of the tags each being selected from different items instead of the entire tag set for the missing item detection. By employing the computation-communication tradeoffs, we design two protocols named M2ID and M2ID+ that classifies the tags before the segmentation compared to the former to improve time efficiency. With the derived optimum parameters, our protocols can achieve up to 4× performance gain in terms of time efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art solution.