Energy efficiency is crucial for radio frequency identification (RFID) systems as the readers are often battery operated. The main source of the energy wastage is the collision which happens when tags access the communication medium at the same time. Thus, an efficient anti-collision protocol could minimize the energy wastage and prolong the lifetime of the RFID systems. In this regard, EPCGlobal-Class1-Generation2 (EPC-C1G2) protocol is currently being used in the commercial RFID readers to provide fast tag identification through efficient collision arbitration using the Q algorithm. However, this protocol requires a lot of control message overheads for its operation. Thus, a reinforcement learning based anti-collision protocol (RL-DFSA) is proposed to provide better time system efficiency while being energy efficient through the minimization of control message overheads. The proposed RL-DFSA was evaluated through extensive simulations and compared with the variants of EPC-Class 1 Generation 2 algorithms that are currently being used in the commercial readers. The results show conclusively that the proposed RL-DFSA performs identically to the very efficient EPC-C1G2 protocol in terms of time system efficiency but readily outperforms the compared protocol in the number of control message overhead required for the operation.

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-Wireless sensor network consists of nodes with limited resources. Hence, it is important to design protocols or algorithms which increases energy efficiency in order to improve the network lifetime. In this paper, techniques used in the network layer (routing) of the internet protocol stack to achieve energy efficiency are reviewed. Usually, the routing protocols are classified into four main schemes: (1) Network Structure, (2) Communication Model, (3) Topology Based, and (4) Reliable Routing. In this work, only network structure based routing protocols are reviewed due to the page constraint. Besides, this type of protocols are much popular among the researchers since they are fairly simple to implement and produce good results as presented in this paper. Also, the pros and cons of each protocols are presented. Finally, the paper concludes with possible further research directions.

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Efficient collision arbitration protocol facilitates fast tag identification in radio frequency identification (RFID) systems. EPCGlobal-Class1-Generation2 (EPC-C1G2) protocol is the current standard for collision arbitration in commercial RFID systems. However, the main drawback of this protocol is that it requires excessive message exchanges between tags and the reader for its operation. This wastes energy of the already resource-constrained RFID readers. Hence, in this work, reinforcement learning based anti-collision protocol (RL-DFSA) is proposed to address the energy efficient collision arbitration problem in the RFID system. The proposed algorithm continuously learns and adapts to the changes in the environment by devising an optimal policy. The proposed RL-DFSA was evaluated through extensive simulations and compared with the variants of EPC-C1G2 algorithms that are currently being used in the commercial readers. Based on the results, it is concluded that RL-DFSA performs equal or better than EPC-C1G2 protocol in delay, throughput and time system efficiency when simulated for sparse and dense environments while requiring one order of magnitude lesser control message exchanges between the reader and the tags.