In a dense and passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) network several readers are placed very close to each other for optimal connectivity and coverage. Such networks are susceptible to reader collision problems. In this paper, a novel and throughput efficient RFID reader's anti-collision protocol is proposed based on Neighbor Friendly Reader Anti-collision (NFRA) mechanism by revising its contention procedure to provide higher throughput in dense reader network. The behavior of the algorithm is evaluated through a set of simulation experiments which demonstrate that the algorithm is 15 more efficient than NFRA. Also, it has higher fairness as compared to NFRA and other state-of-the-art proposals. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.