In large-scale RFID-enabled applications, we sometimes only pay attention to a small set of key tags, instead of all. This paper studies the problem of key tag population tracking, which aims at estimating how many key tags in a given set exist in the current RFID system and how many of them are absent. Previous work is slow to solve this problem due to the serious interference replies from a large number of ordinary (i.e., non-key) tags. However, time-efficiency is a crucial metric to the studied key tag tracking problem. In this paper, we propose a singleton slot-based estimator, which is time-efficient because the RFID reader only needs to observe the status change of expected singleton slots corresponding to key tags instead of the whole time frame. In practice, the ratio of key tags to all current tags is small because "key" members are usually rare. As a result, even when the whole time frame is long, the number of expected singleton slots is limited and the running of our protocol is very fast. To obtain good scalability in large-scale RFID systems, we exploit the sampling idea in the estimation process. Rigorous theoretical analysis shows that the proposed protocol can provide guaranteed estimation accuracy to end users. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms the prior protocols by significantly reducing the time cost.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.