Reader planning in UHF RFID application

Abstract

Based on its' merits of fast tag access speed and long read distance, UHF RFID technology is regarded as a promising technology for both logistics applications and manufacturing applications. By using the electromagnetic wave propagation method in the far field, UHF RFID system gets large impacts from the field nulls and the interferences. The system can only provide satisfactory service under the correct configurations. The configurations may contain the reader communication parameters and the type, position/direction of the reader's antenna and the tag's antenna. Especially in the application scenarios with multiple readers deployed, the reader-to-reader (R2R) interference and the reader-to-tag (R2T) interference must be carefully dealt with to get the good system performance. To help the system integrator configure the system efficiently, a reader planning tool is developed to provide the visualized coverage map under different system configurations. In this paper, the internal design of this tool will be discussed. First, in the scenario with one reader deployed, the communications on the forward link (from reader to tag) and the reverse link (from tag to reader) will be analyzed to get the read probability map. Then, the R2R interference and the R2T interference will be analyzed in the scenarios with multiple readers deployed. This tool is already widely used by the system integrators in many real applications.