R 3

Abstract

Computational Radio Frequency Identification (CRFID) tags operate solely on harvested energy and have emerged as viable platforms for a variety of ubiquitous sensing and computation applications. Due to their battery-less nature, these tags can be permanently deployed in hard-to-reach places where the possibility of tag access is eliminated. In such scenarios, maintaining and upgrading the tag’s firmware becomes infeasible because programming tools, including wired interface and PC-based software, are required to erase, modify, or reprogram the microcontroller unit’s memory. Such limitations necessitate the demand for an over-the-air (OTA) scheme, which can wirelessly reprogram or upgrade the firmware in CRFID tags. In this article, we present R 3 —a reliable OTA reprogramming scheme that is compliant with EPC protocol and requires no hardware upgrade to RFID reader or CRFID tag. We demonstrate our scheme on three platforms, which include both software-defined as well as chip-based CRFID tags, that is, WISP5.1 and Optimized WISP (Opt-WISP), and Spider tag, respectively. The selection also includes both the FLASH- and FRAM-based microcontrollers. We extensively evaluate our scheme in terms of several metrics, including overall system delay, time and energy overhead, and success rate in line with interrogation range. We foresee our endeavor to offer the viability of OTA reprogramming and firmware upgrade for CRFID tokens under practical situations.