NEMO: Neighbourhood‐Aware Efficient Management and Optimization in Dense RFID Systems

ABSTRACT Dense radio frequency identification (RFID) networks suffer from severe reader collisions, redundant reads, and inefficient resource utilization, particularly in large‐scale deployments. Existing approaches, including centralized and hybrid scheduling schemes, fail to scale effectively due to their reliance on global coordination and static allocation mechanisms. This paper presents NEMO (neighbourhood‐aware efficient management and optimization), a fully decentralized neighbourhood‐aware RFID network framework that dynamically optimizes scheduling, power control, and frequency allocation without requiring global coordination. NEMO leverages a novel adaptive scheduling mechanism to mitigate collisions while ensuring fair and efficient tag interrogation. Extensive universal software radio peripheral‐based hardware experiments and large‐scale simulations with up to 5000 readers and 1,000,000 tags demonstrate that NEMO outperforms state‐of‐the‐art protocols by achieving 25% higher throughput, 30% fewer collisions, 40% reduction in redundant reads, and improved energy efficiency by 18%. Additionally, NEMO exhibits scalability and robustness under extreme network congestion by maintaining high performance even as the numbers of readers and tags increase. The proposed framework is highly applicable to real‐world RFID deployments in warehouses, logistics, smart retail, Internet of Things, and industrial automation, where dense RFID environments demand efficient, adaptive, and decentralized resource management.