An Efficient Scheme for Tag Information Update in RFID Systems on Roads

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems on roads (RSR) is a recently developed framework that focuses on enhancing transportation safety. In RSR, large-scale passive RFID tags with road-related information are deployed on road surfaces or roadside units. A vehicle with an onboard RFID reader can acquire road information via reading from these RFID tags. As a result, it is critical to update the tags with the latest road information (particularly emergent alerts) in a timely manner in RSR. In this paper, we design a novel cluster-based information diffusion scheme that aims to quickly and accurately update the contents of the RFID tags. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to focus on the problem of updating RFID tags in RSR. Our proposed scheme organizes RFID tags into clusters. The emergent information and update status of these clustered tags can be read by vehicles passing by. These vehicles can exchange such information with each other via vehicle-to-vehicle (or vehicle-to-infrastructure) (V2V or V2I) communications. After synthesizing the received information, these vehicles can update the nearby tags and spread the information accordingly. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that our proposed information diffusion scheme can effectively update the tags within a certain time constraint under various scenarios.