skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


This content will become publicly available on December 18, 2025

Title: Optimizing Adaptive Power Control for Enhancing Robustness in RFID Sensing
In dense RFID systems, power control provides an effective means for maintaining communication efficiency and preventing reader-to-reader and reader-to-tag interference. Traditional RFID systems often operate at fixed power levels, which can lead to communication bottlenecks and inefficient tag reads in dynamic environments. This paper proposes an adaptive power control technique to improve the system performance by dynamically adjusting the transmit power based on environmental conditions, tag distance, and network congestion. Simulations and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach improves tag read rates, reduces interference, and enhances system robustness in dense environments.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2245607
PAR ID:
10598021
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
ISSN:
2836-3574
ISBN:
979-8-3315-4022-7
Page Range / eLocation ID:
157 to 160
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
RFID, adaptive power control, interference management, robust RFID sensing, RFID sensing performance.
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Daytona Beach, FL, USA
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. In dense RFID systems, efficient coordination of multiple readers is crucial to prevent reader-to-reader interference (RRI) and ensure optimal system performance. As the number of readers and tags increases, static frequency and time-slot assignment become insufficient to handle dynamic network conditions, leading to collisions, missed tag reads, and degraded throughput. In this paper, we propose a decentralized neigh-borhood discovery and management scheme for RFID systems operating in high-density environments. Our approach minimizes interference and improves tag read accuracy by dynamically adjusting communication parameters like frequency and time slots based on current system conditions, which are updated by periodic information exchanges among readers. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves system scalability, throughput, and reliability. The proposed framework offers a scalable and adaptive solution for dense reader environments. 
    more » « less
  2. Dense RFID environments pose critical challenges such as Reader-to-Reader Interference (RRI), Reader-to-Tag Collisions (RTC), and inefficient resource utilization, which degrade system performance and scalability. Traditional Media Access Control (MAC) protocols, including CSMA and TDMA, struggle to address these issues effectively, particularly in dynamic and large-scale deployments. This paper introduces MCSMARA (Markov Decision Process (MDP)-based Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Reader Arbitration), a novel MAC protocol designed to optimize reader coordination in dense RFID networks. By leveraging an MDP framework, MCSMARA models reader state transitions and employs a utility-based arbitration mechanism to dynamically allocate frequencies and time slots. The protocol incorporates adaptive backoff and decentralized neighborhood discovery for efficient resource management without centralized control. Simulation results demonstrate that MCSMARA reduces collisions by up to 30%, improves throughput by 25%, and ensures superior scalability, supporting a large amount of readers with minimal computational overhead. These findings establish MCSMARA as a transformative solution for RFID networks in logistics, retail, and industrial IoT, with potential for extension to mobile and heterogeneous environments. 
    more » « less
  3. Currently, there is an increasing interest in the use of RFID systems with passive or battery-less tags with sensors incorporated, also known as computational RFID (CRFID) systems. These passive tags use the reader signal to power up their microcontroller and an attached sensor. Following the current standard EPC C1G2, the reader must identify the tag (receive the tag's identification code) prior to receive data from its sensor. In a typical RFID scenario, several sensor tags share the reader interrogation zone, and during their identification process, their responses often collide, increasing their identification time. Therefore, RFID application developers must be mindful of tag anti-collision protocols when dealing with CRFID tags in dense RFID sensor networks. So far, significant effort has been invested in simulation-based analysis of the performance of anti-collision protocols regarding the tags identification time. However, no one has explored the experimental performance of anti-collision protocols in an RFID sensor network using CRFID. This paper: (i) demonstrates that the impact of one tag identification time over the total time required to read one sensor data from that same tag is very significant, and (ii) presents an UHF-SDR RFID system which validates the improvement of FuzzyQ, a fast anticollision protocol, in relation to the protocol used in the current RFID standard. 
    more » « less
  4. Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology for automated identification of objects and people. RFID technology is expected to find extensive use in applications related to the Internet of Things, and in particular applications of Internet of Battlefield Things. Of particular interest are passive RFID tags due to a number of their salient advantages. Such tags, lacking energy sources of their own, use backscattering of the power of an RF source (a reader) to communicate. Recently, passive RFID tag-to-tag (T2T) communication has been demonstrated, via which tags can directly communicate with each other and share information. This opens the possibility of building a Network of Tags (NeTa), in which the passive tags communicate among themselves to perform data processing functions. Among possible applications of NeTa are monitoring services in hard-to-reach locations. As an essential step toward implementation of NeTa, we consider a novel multi-hop network architecture; in particular, with the proposed novel turbo backscattering operation, inter-tag distances can be significantly increased. Due to the interference among tags’ transmissions, one of the main technical challenges of implementing such the NeTa architecture is the routing protocol design. In this paper, we introduce a design of a routing protocol, which is based on a solution of a non-linear binary optimization problem. We study the performance of the proposed protocol and investigate impacts of several network factors, such as the tag density and the transmit power of the reader. 
    more » « less
  5. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to read UHF RFID tags without a carrier. Specifically, we introduce an alternative reader design that does not emit a carrier and allows reading RFID tags intended for conventional carrier-based systems. While traditional RFID tags modulate a carrier, it is important to note that a modulation circuit used for backscatter also modulates the inherent noise of the tag circuitry, including the Johnson noise, irrespective of whether a carrier is present or not. Our Modulated Noise Communication (MNC) approach leverages recent work on Modulated Johnson Noise (MJN) and can be read by an alternative RFID reader design that enables simpler, more accessible RFID readings than a conventional backscatter reader by eliminating self-jamming obstructions. MNC is shown to support wireless transmission of data packets between 2 cm to 10 cm of separation between a standard UHF RFID tag and the proposed alternative reader for data rates of 1 bps and 2 bps. 
    more » « less