Room-Coverage Improvements in UHF RFID with Commodity Hardware [Wireless Corner]

This work studies the three-dimensional (3D) identification performance of UHF RFID systems with commodity hardware. Detailed three-dimensional propagation modeling is developed, with ray-tracing that allows examination of tag- as well as reader-antenna diversity. It is shown that multipath can enhance identification performance compared to free-space conditions. Furthermore, it is found that tag diversity can enhance identification performance on the order of 10%. Reader-antenna diversity becomes beneficial only when special attention is given to controlling the destructive summation of the transmitted fields and simple, general antenna-installation rules are provided. Performance can be further enhanced with the introduction of a phase shifter or appropriate transmission scheduling, and various examples are discussed. Measurements inside a room with a dense three-dimensional grid of passive RFID tags confirmed the results. Finally, a method to perform power-measurements with commodity RFID hardware that exploits the sensitivity-during-read threshold of each tag is put forth.