In the radio frequency identification (RFID) system based on surface acoustic wave (SAW) technique,some tags often locate in the field of a transceiver at the same time.These tags produce simultaneous echo signals which collide when they arrive back at the transceiver, which leads to difficult identification.In this paper,smart antenna technique is presented to implement anti-collision in SAW RFID system.The direction of arrivals (DOAs) are used to denote the locations of tags, and genetic algorithm (GA) is suggested to find the optimal estimates of the DOAs in complex multimodal search spaces.Once the DOAs are obtained, the array weights are formed and the signals of tags are recovered to implement decoding.The experimental results show that the GAbased smart antenna technique works well in some occasions.