Load Balancing in Large-Scale RFID Systems

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.

[1]  Leen Stougie,et al.  Multiprocessing scheduling with rejection. Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM-SIAM symposium on discrete algorithms (SODA), January 28-30, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 1996 , 1996 .

[2]  David B. Shmoys,et al.  Using dual approximation algorithms for scheduling problems: Theoretical and practical results , 1985, 26th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1985).

[3]  J. Landt,et al.  The history of RFID , 2005, IEEE Potentials.

[4]  Clifford Stein,et al.  Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd edition. , 2001 .

[5]  Ellis Horowitz,et al.  Exact and Approximate Algorithms for Scheduling Nonidentical Processors , 1976, JACM.

[6]  Éva Tardos,et al.  Scheduling unrelated machines with costs , 1993, SODA '93.

[7]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  Introduction to Algorithms , 1990 .

[8]  Seung-Jae Han,et al.  Fairness and Load Balancing in Wireless LANs Using Association Control , 2004, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[9]  Ananth Grama,et al.  Redundant reader elimination in RFID systems , 2005, 2005 Second Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2005. IEEE SECON 2005..

[10]  David Finkel,et al.  Book review: The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis by R. Jain (Wiley-Interscience, 1991) , 1990, PERV.

[11]  Murali S. Kodialam,et al.  Characterizing the capacity region in multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks , 2005, MobiCom '05.

[12]  Daniel W. Engels,et al.  RFID Systems and Security and Privacy Implications , 2002, CHES.

[13]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition , 2001 .

[14]  Koushik Kar,et al.  Load Balancing in Large-Scale RFID Systems , 2007, INFOCOM.

[15]  Leen Stougie,et al.  Multiprocessor scheduling with rejection , 1996, SODA '96.

[16]  Radha Poovendran,et al.  Maximizing static network lifetime of wireless broadcast ad hoc networks , 2003, IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2003. ICC '03..

[17]  Leandros Tassiulas,et al.  Energy conserving routing in wireless ad-hoc networks , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[18]  Raj Jain,et al.  The art of computer systems performance analysis - techniques for experimental design, measurement, simulation, and modeling , 1991, Wiley professional computing.

[19]  Jan Karel Lenstra,et al.  Approximation algorithms for scheduling unrelated parallel machines , 1987, 28th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1987).

[20]  Murali S. Kodialam,et al.  Fast and reliable estimation schemes in RFID systems , 2006, MobiCom '06.

[21]  David S. Johnson,et al.  Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness , 1978 .