An analytical model for electromagnetically coupled UHF RFID sensor tags

This paper presents an analytical model for electromagnetically coupled UHF RFID sensor tags where a coupling loop with an embedded sensor is attached to an ordinary UHF RFID tag with a small gap. Electromagnetic coupling is used, in this case, to modulate the properties of the tag antenna in proportion to the values of the embedded sensor. The antenna together with the coupling loop are represented as an equivalent circuit and the analysis of the sensor tag becomes a circuit-level calculation after extracting parameters from full-wave simulations for, respectively, the separated dipole antenna and coupling loop. The results calculated from the equivalent circuit model are compared with the results from full-wave simulations and show good agreement. The presented model can thus be used for analyzing and predicting the behavior of electromagnetically coupled sensor tags. Based on the analysis with the presented model, the methods for optimizing the sensory performance of this kind of RFID sensor tags are also presented in this paper.