Analytic Hierarchy Process Based Compatibility Measurement for RFID Protocols

In recent years, radio frequency identification (RFID) based information query is widely used in many ap-plications. In order to meet various application requirements, different kinds of RFID protocols are proposed, such as ID collection, category estimation, and missing tag identification. We find that the structure and function used in these RFID protocols are quite similar. For example, empty slot skipping and collision slot reconciling are used in many protocols. An improvement in one protocol may also be applied in another protocol, or a combination of two compatible protocols can fulfill a new application requirement. However, currently there is no approach to measure the compatibility of two RFID protocols. In this study, we theoretically proposed the concept of RFID protocol compatibility and designed an approach to measure it. Analytic hierarchy process approach is revised for this purpose. The important features of an RFID protocol are identified, and then determine their weights according to their importance. The similarity of two protocols are computed by the weighted similarity of lowest level features. We validate this approach by using eight typical RFID protocols, and show useful information for the protocol design. For example, the results show the compatibility between CLS and SFMTI reaches 89.5 %, while the compatibility between CLS and TKQ is only 20.71 %, this conforms the characteristics of these protocols.