Backscattering UWB/UHF hybrid solutions for multi-reader multi-tag passive RFID systems

Abstract

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is foreseen as a promising solution to overcome the limits of ultra-high frequency (UHF) techniques toward the development of green radio frequency identification (RFID) systems with low energy consumption and localization capabilities. While UWB techniques have been already employed for active tags, passive tags solutions are more appealing also due to their lower cost. With the fundamental requirement of maintaining backward compatibility in the RFID domain, we propose a hybrid UWB/UHF architecture to improve passive tag identification both in single-reader and multi-reader scenarios. We then develop two hybrid algorithms: the first one exploits the UWB signal to improve ISO/IEC 18000-6C UHF standard, while the other one exploits UWB to enhance a compressive sensing (CS) technique for tag identification in the multi-reader, multi-tag scenario. Both solutions are able to improve success rate and reading speed in the tag identification process and reduce the energy consumption. The multi-reader version of the proposed approaches is based on a cooperative scheme in order to manage reader-tag collisions and reader-reader collisions besides the typical tag-tag collisions. Furthermore, timing synchronization non-idealities are analyzed for the proposed solutions and simulation results reveal the effectiveness of the developed schemes.