Automated Testing of Wireless Link Standards

With the increase of the wireless market, there is a trend to equip a hand held wireless device with all the features of a desktop. The wireless devices are becoming more and more integrated into our everyday lives. As these devices become less of a technology toy, and more of a necessity, we will find that our dependence on the correct operation and non-interference of the device rises to the level that errors or defects will not be tolerated readily.This means that the devices we will use in the future will not malfunction at all, which is not practical in engineering, or that the wireless devices developed will have to be extensively and rigorously tested. These tests have to follow a standard based approach. The ISO/ICE 18000 - Part 7 standard defines the air interface for radio-frequency identification (RFID) devices operating in the 433.92MHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band used in item management applications. The test procedures are divided into two parts. Testing the interrogator (reader) and testing the tag (both active and passive).This thesis document explains the development of generalized test procedures to test a wireless RFID device, and for conformance to the ISO/ICE 18000 - Part 7 standard as a particular example. A brief description on how to configure and use the test procedures is also included. The test procedures were developed using Labview software, which is a versatile graphical programming language that can be used for programming hardware devices. The test procedures were developed so that they can be easily updated if the standard itself changes and also they can be modified to develop new test procedures for different standards

Development of Automated Test Analysis, Methodology and Procedure for Interoperability Measure in ISO 18000-7 Active RFID

In today's modern development process, for all embedded systems including wireless devices, commercial off the shelf products form the basic building blocks of the design. Such projects, often confront interoperability conflicts mainly because of the incompatible assumptions made by the development engineers and many possible solutions available for every problem. Lack of standard procedures and a sound mathematical basis describing the interoperability verification process and electronic tools to aid the interoperability analysis is hindering development of interoperable systems. It is therefore essential to develop a methodology to analyze and develop an interoperable measure of the system during and after development. It is also important to develop tools that will aid interoperability analysis with minimum human supervision. As an example, active RFID systems conforming to standards such as ISO 18000-7 are designed to meet customer requirements. Apart from conforming to all the required standards, these RFID systems also need to be interoperable with each other. In simple terms the reader of any one vendor should be able to communicate with tags from all vendors.The first step in verifying interoperability is to determine all factors, including those not explicitly defined by the standard, and determining the extreme limits of operation of each factor. In designing the analysis tool, statistical concepts like analysis of variance will be used to determine the effect of one factor on other and to determine the minimum number of required factors in an experiment. Depending on controllable factors, uncontrollable factors and dependent factors, the minimum number of experiments will be designed using blocking and randomizing techniques. The confidence level associated each experiment will be calculated using the acceptance sampling technique. Finally a technique to compare experiments performed on the same or different setup is proposed.This method is not only limited to active RFID but has the potential to revolutionize interoperability verification process among all wireless devices communicating via a command - reply protocol. The developed procedures will assist in planning the development process and also help alter it where and when necessary while not only obeying the standard but also understanding the ultimate essence of it