Gen2 RFID as IoT Enabler: Characterization and Performance Improvement

RFID has become an enabling technology for IoT implementation. In dynamic RFID scenarios, such as smart shops or industrial surroundings, it is crucial to identify every good, with an applied RFID tag, before it leaves the interrogation area. Currently, commercial reader solutions adopt DFSA protocol as a simple MAC that manages the communication between a reader and multiple tags. To increase DFSA throughput (the number of read tags in the unit of time) and thus speed up tag identification, simple calculations show that the number of tags should equal the frame size. However, the literature exhibiting RFID performance shows that tag responsiveness is stochastic, while this has been often neglected when considering the throughput. To investigate the influence and to define related research challenges in the RFID domain, this work provides the idea of the required measurements by using SDR technology, while arguing that PHY and MAC layers should be looked at integrally. If not, tag identification will be delayed, while at the same time unnecessary energy waste will occur. In the measurement campaigns, the metric of TRP is employed, given as tag response probability distribution, which can be used for modeling the MAC layer.