On Batch Writing in COTS RFID Systems

We study the batch writing problem in RFID systems, where the reader seeks the most time-efficient way to write information into a given subset of tags. The problem is analogous to the multicast problem in classical networks, but one-to-many transmission is not supported in COTS RFID systems. Driven by the technical challenge, this paper addresses the problem of designing batch writing algorithms for COTS RFID systems. We make three contributions. First, we establish the minimal execution time for any batch writing algorithm, thus setting the theoretical performance limit. Second, we quantitatively compare and gauge the existing propositions applicable to our problem. Third, we develop a novel batch writing algorithm with minimal 25% performance gain over the best state-of-the-art solution. Our key technicalities are designing an encoding scheme allowing the reader to efficiently perform batch writing and optimizing the batch writing sequence to minimize the overall execution time. We also perform extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.