Reading large numbers of RFID tags has a similar Collision avoidance issue. At the user level, when there are too many tags/read collisions in an area, I reduce transmit power so that my "read bubble" is smaller. You then move the reader around physically until you quit seeing new tags. This is a form of space division.
This is a summary of how RFID solves it at the protocol level, mostly using time division. In practice using cheap readers, I have found this to work up to a few hundreds of tags in one read bubble.
Very cool. This would be interesting to look into for the simplified drone simulation I have here. If we wanted a drone to only communicate to let's say 4 others, then we might send out a ping and see how many respond, decreasing our range until only 4 respond. But not all drones that recieve our ping can respond since their range may already be decreased. I'm not sure what arrangment that would result in generally, but I'm going to have some fun looking into it, thanks for the info.
This is a summary of how RFID solves it at the protocol level, mostly using time division. In practice using cheap readers, I have found this to work up to a few hundreds of tags in one read bubble.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/8/8/1282