Patent ID: 7911323

Claim:
An apparatus for interrogating radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, a reader comprising: a transmitter; and a module to form a request to be transmitted by the transmitter, the request to indicate a number of timeslots and a number of modulation modes supported by the module to process within the apparatus one or more responses to the request from a number of RFID tags, wherein the number of timeslots and the number of modulation modes are optimized by the apparatus, based upon an Q value that addresses the number of RFID tags within the apparatus, and the value 2 Q represents the available timeslots to receive responses from the RFID tags; wherein each RFID tag comprises a control logic to: randomly select one of a plurality of modulation modes, wherein the randomly selected modulation modes is selected from an optimized range of modulations modes indicated in the request, received, wherein each said modulation mode corresponds to a particular data transfer rate and wherein the optimized range of modulation modes is determined based upon the known number of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags; and form a response to the request to be transmitted.