[Back]

B. Ramos Elbal:
"Measurement Based Evaluation of the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform";
Supervisor: M. Mayer, N. Görtz; Institute of Telecommunications, 2015.

The Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology has expanded rapidly and became very important during the last decades. New application are quickly emerging, as well as new protocols in order to reduce the identification process time.
The Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) was developed by Joshua R. Smith et al. in order to investigate RFID combined with computing and sensing applications. The WISP is an open source, open architecture EPCglobal conform RFID tag, operating in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band. It comprises a fully programmable low power 16 bit microcontroller, sensors and an energy harvesting stage that enables passive operation, i.e., the WISP is completely supplied by the electromagnetic field emitted by an RFID reader. To transport information from WISP to reader, the WISP modulates its antenna load impedance according to the data, thereby producing an amplitude-modulated backscatter signal that is captured by the reader.
In this work, the properties of WISPs are investigated in order to determine their operational characteristics, implement new protocols and find out the characteristics of a multiple tag scenario. To that end, firmware for various application cases was written, radio frequency measurements were conducted and the results were evaluated. Through that course of action, some implementation obstacles were identified: considering several WISPs to be read out simultaneously, they have to be placed with a sufficient spacing, and synchronizing their responses remains a challenge.

radio frequency identification, RFID

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_240043.pdf