Streaming RFID: Robust Stream Transmission over Passive RFID

Abstract

This paper proposes the streaming radio frequency identification (RFID) protocol to support robust data streaming in a passive communication, which is extended from the ISO18000-6 Type C RFID standard. By observing and modeling the unique bit error behavior through detailed analysis in this paper, we found that performance is significantly limited by inaccurate and unstable link frequencies as well as low SNR which are inevitable for passive devices. Based on the analysis, we propose a simple and efficient protocol to adaptively insert extra error control sequences in a packet for tolerating tough link condition while maximizing the throughput and preserving the minimal implementation cost. To evaluate effectiveness of our proposal in real-time streaming applications, we experimented on real-time H.264 video streaming and prototyped the system on FPGA. To our best knowledge, our paper is the first work to take analytical approach for maximizing the throughput and demonstrate the possibility of the realtime multimedia streaming transmission in the passive RFID system.