Abstract-A radio frequency identifier (RFID) system consists of inexpensive, uniquely-identifiable tags that are mounted on physical objects, and readers that track these tags (and hence these physical objects) through RF communication. In this paper we, therefore, address this load balancing problem for readers -given a set of tags that are within range of each reader, which of these tags should each reader be responsible for such that the cost for monitoring tags across the different readers is balanced, while guaranteeing that each tag is monitored by at least one reader. We show that a generalized variant of the load balancing problem is NP-hard and hence present a 2-approximation centralized algorithm. We next present an optimal centralized solution for a specialized variant. Subsequently, we present a localized distributed algorithm that is probabilistic in nature and closely matches the performance of the centralized algorithms. Our results demonstrate that our schemes achieve very good performance even in highly dynamic large-scale RFID systems.
Besides, other scenarios with concurrent operation of several RFID readers have been proposed in the literature; e.g., Dong et al. REF analyzed how a given set of tags should be assigned to readers so that the cost of tag monitoring across the different readers is balanced, while guaranteeing that at least one reader monitors each tag.
Load Balancing in Large-Scale RFID Systems
IEEE INFOCOM 2007 - 26th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications
IEEE INFOCOM 2007 - 26th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications
Computer Science