A chipless sensor tag-based RFID technology for cyber-oriented environmental sensing applications

Abstract

A chipless sensor tag-based radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that allows wireless collection of information from the environment, and the monitoring and accessing of the given information through cyberspace is presented. The developed system consists of a cyber enabled RFID reader and passive chipless RFID sensor tags. The reader is comprised of an analog part that wirelessly communicates with the sensor tags, and a single board computer (SBC) part. Each passive chipless sensor tag consists of a microstrip antenna and a sensor. The sensor information is amplitude modulated in the backscattered signal of the tag. The analog reader part receives the backscattered signal and feeds it to the SBC, which computes the sensor information into a 96 bit serialized global trade item number (SGTIN-96) electronic product code (EPC). Moreover, the SBC makes the information available on a cyberspace-accessible secure user interface. The reported system has been applied for temperature sensing, where the change in temperature at the tag ranging from 27°C to 140°C resulted in a 28% amplitude change at the analog part of the reader. The temperature at the tag has been monitored by accessing the reader through cyberspace using a web-based user interfaces developed for the SBC.