A Flexible Dual Frequency Testbed for RFID

Abstract

This paper presents the setup of a testbed developed for the fast evaluation of RFID systems in two frequency domains. At the one hand the 13.56 MHz and at the other hand the 868 MHz frequency domain are supported. The suggested design flow for configuring the testbed is highly automated and supports rapid evaluations of different designs and implementations within shortest time. Several layers of abstraction for rating existing and future RFID standards are provided, from abstract simulation models down to the implementation on the rapid prototype. This includes a fast setup for measuring and rating existing RFID standards, or running them side by side, as well as the rapid exploration of future RFID designs and various aspects of those prototypes. It allows for verifying both protocol stack-and signal processing of RFID systems. In order to demonstrate this concept, we briefly describe an implemented example system, and our overall hardware layout in detail. Measurement results on two existing RFID standards corroborate the concept.

Evaluation and exploration of RFID systems by rapid prototyping

“…With this approach, various signal processing architectures have been rated to each other, e.g., receivers using envelope demodulators and I/Q demodulators with different signal detection schemes, or different synchronization units [42,62]. Measurement results on exploring the performance trade-offs in RFID systems are shown in Sect.…”

“…Its functionality is examined both in simulations and in a measurement environment. This approach is followed for instance in the study by [35,37,57,58] for RFID tags or in [42,59] for RFID readers. Furthermore, the approach of an automatic generation of hardware modules out of highlevel descriptions, as it is common practice in chip design [60], is demonstrated on the example of encoding and decoding units in RFID [61,62].…”

“…Several powerful RFID simulation environments have been reported recently: Typical questions of research here include the evaluation of a single component of the RFID equipment, like RFID tags [35][36][37], readers [38], or antennas and analog parts [39,40], physical and logical layer simulation and its impact on the performance of the RFID system in different frequency domains [36,[41][42][43][44]. Simulators further call attention to multi-tag and multireader environments [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52].…”

Simple Low Cost Open Source UHF RFID Reader

“…Finally, the decoded sequence is obtained from the 2 last ∆t i (see Fig. 5, line [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and is presented in Table I line 3. For example, with the two previous ∆t 1 = 186 and ∆t 2 = 190 values, decoded bit is equal to 0.…”