Assessing the Performance of a Novel Tag-based Reader-to-Reader Communication Paradigm under Noisy Channel Conditions

The widespread deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers paved the way for research activities focused on applications that go well beyond the mere identification of people and goods. In this context, the paper investigates an innovative paradigm, according to which the residual data storage capacity of passive RFID tags is used as a kind of “virtual” communication channel to exchange data in RFID ecosystems of the Internet of Things (IoT). The performance of the paradigm is assessed through the evaluation of a number of important communication parameters, such as goodput and delay. The analytical study, validated through simulations, evaluates the impact that the following key parameters have on the system performance: 1) radio channel errors; 2) collisions; 3) number of involved readers; 4) memory block reading size under noisy channel conditions; and 5) heterogeneous storage capacity of available tags. This allows obtaining design directives for a well-performing implementation of the proposed communication paradigm. In particular, accounting for the negative effects of channel errors on the system goodput, in this paper, we highlight the relationship between optimal memory reading block size and channel errors to maximize the communication performance.