The Influence of the Nonideal Phase Offset on SAR-Based Localization in Passive UHF RFID

Abstract

The existing radio frequency identification (RFID) localization methods typically regard the initial phase of the signal as constant. This is feasible when the antenna and the tag are stationary. However, in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) RFID localization, the relative motion of the reader antenna and tag changes the antenna phase center and tag orientation, thus resulting in a continuous change of the initial phase. This change, which will cause the nonideal phase offset (NPO) and, thus, have an adverse effect on positioning, has been neglected in most previous SAR RFID studies. In this article, we investigate the antenna phase uncertainty and the tag orientation-dependent phase offset and analyze their influence on localization accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the initial phase is regarded as a variable in SAR RFID localization. In addition, a novel motion model-based localization (MoLoc) method is proposed, which exploits the relative motion model and visualizes the influence of NPO more intuitively. Compared with the conventional grid-matching methods, MoLoc shows higher accuracy and much lower computation time. Both the influence of NPO and the performance of MoLoc are verified by experiments implemented in real scenario. The experiments also evaluate the influence of NPO on the grid-matching method. The experimental results show that NPO has a significant impact on the accuracy of SAR-based localization methods.