ShakeReader: 'Read' UHF RFID using Smartphone

Abstract

UHF RFID technology becomes increasingly popular in stores, since it can quickly read a large number of RFID tags from afar. The deployed RFID infrastructure, however, does not directly benefit smartphone users in stores, mainly because smartphones cannot read UHF RFID tags or fetch relevant information. This paper aims to bridge the gap and allow users to 'read' UHF RFID tags using their smartphones, without any hardware modification to either deployed RFID systems or smartphone hardware. To ‘read’ an interested tag, a user makes a pre-defined smartphone gesture in front of an interested tag. The smartphone gesture causes changes in 1) RFID measurement data captured by RFID infrastructure, and 2) motion sensor data captured by the user's smartphone. By matching the two data, our system (named ShakeReader) can pair the interested tag with the corresponding smartphone, thereby enabling the smartphone to indirectly 'read' the interested tag. We build a novel reflector polarization model to analyze the impact of smartphone gesture to RFID backscattered signals. We enhance the basic version of ShakeReader [6] by improving its performance in densely deployed scenarios. Experimental results show that ShakeReader can accurately pair interested tags with their corresponding smartphones with an accuracy of >96.3%.