On the Mitigation of Interference Imposed by Intruders in Passive RFID Networks

RFID networks are becoming an integral part of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) era. Within this paradigm passive RFID networks have emerged as low cost energy-efficient alternatives that find applicability in a wide range of applications. However, such RFID networks and devices, due to their limited capabilities, can easily become vulnerable to several intrusive actions. In this paper, the problem of proactively protecting a passive RFID network from security threats imposed by intruders that introduce high interference to the system resulting in the possible disruption of the network’s proper operation is investigated. Passive RFID tags are associated with a well-designed utility function reflecting on one hand their goal to have their signal properly demodulated by the reader, and on the other hand their risk level of participating in the network, stemming from their hardware characteristics among others, thus characterizing them as normal or intruder tags. An interference mitigation risk aware (IMRA) problem is introduced aiming at maximizing each tag’s utility function, thus implicitly enforcing tags to conform to a more social behavior. Due to its nature, the proposed problem is formulated as a non-cooperative game among all the tags (normal and intruders) and its Nash equilibrium point is determined via adopting the theory of supermodular games. Convergence of the game to its Nash equilibrium is also shown. A distributed iterative and low-complexity algorithm is proposed in order to obtain the Nash equilibrium point and the operational effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated through modeling and simulation.