Development of Sensor Integrated and Inkjet-Printed Tag Antennas for Passive UHF RFID Systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a form of automated identification technology that is nowadays widely used to replace bar codes in asset tracking and management. Looking ahead to the future, our lives will be surrounded by small, embedded and wireless electronic devices that provide information about everything for everybody through pervasive computing. At the core of this vision lie two key concepts of ubiquitous sensing and the Internet of Things. RFID technology is seen as one of the most prominent technologies of today for the implementation of these future concepts. Ubiquitous sensing describes a situation, where small embedded sensors monitoring various environmental parameters are found everywhere. The second concept, the Internet of Things, requires that all objects, even the most insignificant everyday items, surrounding us should encompass computing and communication capabilities of some sort. In its simplest form, such computing could be a transponder that allows the unique identification and tracking of the item. Together these future concepts could truly revolutionize our lives by delivering significantly more information from our living environment. The objectives of this thesis are twofold. Firstly, passive ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID technology is utilized to develop low cost, completely passive, wireless sensor devices for ubiquitous sensing applications. Secondly, inkjet-printed passive UHF RFID tag antennas are developed and optimization techniques are presented to lower the cost of such tag antenna implementations. The latter objective aims to facilitate the advancement of the Internet of Things by enabling tag antennas to be directly printed on or in to various objects. As a result of the research work presented in this thesis, three different passive UHF RFID based sensor tags were developed. Two of these designs monitor temperature and one is developed for relative humidity measurements. For the first time, the applicability and accuracy of such passive sensor tags was demonstrated. The results show that UHF RFID sensor tags have potential to be utilized as low cost sensor devices in ubiquitous applications. In addition, this thesis presents methods to lower the costs of inkjet-printed tag antennas. A technique was developed to reduce the ink consumption significantly to produce high performance tag antennas. Moreover, a special type of tag antenna design consisting of very narrow lines was developed. Finally, novel electronic materials were used as tag antenna substrate materials for inkjet-printed tag antennas. The use of a high permittivity ceramic-polymer composite, wood veneer, paper and cardboard were demonstrated. In each case, it was shown that inkjet-printing is a feasible form of fabrication on such materials, producing passive UHF RFID tags with long read ranges. This shows that tag antennas can be inkjet-printed directly on to various items to advance the realization of the Internet of Things

An IoT-Aware Smart System Exploiting the Electromagnetic Behavior of UHF-RFID Tags to Improve Worker Safety in Outdoor Environments

Recently, different solutions leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have been adopted to avoid accidents in agricultural working environments. As an example, heavy vehicles, e.g., tractors or excavators, have been upgraded with remote controls. Nonetheless, the community continues to encourage discussions on safety issues. In this framework, a localization system installed on remote-controlled farm machines (RCFM) can help in preventing fatal accidents and reduce collision risks. This paper presents an innovative system that exploits passive UHF-RFID technology supported by commercial BLE Beacons for monitoring and preventing accidents that may occur when ground-workers in RCFM collaborate in outdoor agricultural working areas. To this aim, a modular architecture is proposed to locate workers, obstacles and machines and guarantees the security of RCFM movements by using specific notifications for ground-workers prompt interventions. Its main characteristics are presented with its main positioning features based on passive UHF-RFID technology. An experimental campaign discusses its performance and determines the best configuration of the UHF-RFID tags installed on workers and obstacles. Finally, system validation demonstrates the reliability of the main components and the usefulness of the proposed architecture for worker safety

RFID Backscattering in Long-Range Scenarios

This paper presents a 5.8-GHz RFID tag that, by exploiting the quantum tunneling effect, significantly increases the range of backscatter radio links. We present an electronically simple Tunneling RFID Tag characterized by return gains as high as 35 dB with link sensitivity as low as −81 dBm. Without relevant increase in power consumption, the tunneling tag enables a host of new wireless sensors and Internet of Things applications that require both the long range of conventional wireless links and the low power consumption of semi-passive RFID devices. Selected measurements demonstrate a reader-to-tag separation distance 10 times higher than the maximum range of ideal semi-passive tags. Moreover, the collected experimental results allowed to outline a mathematical model demonstrating how the long-range RFID tag prototype can achieve distances unusual for this technology

RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others. The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications. Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT. Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques, algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Simulation of undular bores evolution with damping

Propagation of undular bores with damping is considered in the framework of perturbed extended Korteweg-de Vries (peKdV) equation. Two types of damping terms for the peKdV equation, namely linear and Chezy frictional terms, which describe the turbulent boundary layers in the fluid flow are considered. Solving the peKdV equation numerically using the method of lines shows that under the influence of damping, the lead-ing solitary wave of the undular bores will split from the nonlinear wavetrain, propagates and behaves like an isolated solitary wave. The amplitude of the leading wave will remain the same for some times before it starts to decay again at a larger time. In general the amplitude of the leading wave and the mean level across the undular bore decreases due to the effect of damping

A survey on subjecting electronic product code and non-ID objects to IP identification

Over the last decade, both research on the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-world IoT applications have grown exponentially. The IoT provides us with smarter cities, intelligent homes, and generally more comfortable lives. However, the introduction of these devices has led to several new challenges that must be addressed. One of the critical challenges facing interacting with IoT devices is to address billions of devices (things) around the world, including computers, tablets, smartphones, wearable devices, sensors, and embedded computers, and so on. This article provides a survey on subjecting Electronic Product Code and non-ID objects to IP identification for IoT devices, including their advantages and disadvantages thereof. Different metrics are here proposed and used for evaluating these methods. In particular, the main methods are evaluated in terms of their: (i) computational overhead, (ii) scalability, (iii) adaptability, (iv) implementation cost, and (v) whether applicable to already ID-based objects and presented in tabular format. Finally, the article proves that this field of research will still be ongoing, but any new technique must favorably offer the mentioned five evaluative parameters.Comment: 112 references, 8 figures, 6 tables, Journal of Engineering Reports, Wiley, 2020 (Open Access

ISO/EPC Addressing Methods to Support Supply Chain in the Internet of Things

RFID systems are among the major infrastructures of the Internet of Things, which follow ISO and EPC standards. In addition, ISO standard constitutes the main layers of supply chain, and many RFID systems benefit from ISO standard for different purposes. In this paper, we tried to introduce addressing systems based on ISO standards, through which the range of things connected to the Internet of Things will grow. Our proposed methods are addressing methods which can be applied to both ISO and EPC standards. The proposed methods are simple, hierarchical, and low cost implementation. In addition, the presented methods enhance interoperability among RFIDs, and also enjoys a high scalability, since it well covers all of EPC schemes and ISO supply chain standards. Further, by benefiting from a new algorithm for long EPCs known as selection algorithm, they can significantly facilitate and accelerate the operation of address mapping.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1807.0217