This work presents the design of a portable radio frequency identification (RFID) tower solution capable of electronically controlled beam reconfiguration for monitoring and surveillance applications in a large room or workspace. This tower is a complete RFID solution that consists of an RFID antenna, an RFID reader module, and an automated, controlled motorized stage to rotate and slide the antenna arrangement mechanically for reconfiguring the beam coverage area. A single designed RFID tower (size 80 cm × 20 cm × 30 cm) can efficiently cover an 8 m × 8 m area and works in the frequency band (865–867 MHz) allocated for RFID applications. This work also presents the interface to control the motor rotation and three different methodologies based on different RFID applications. The proposed RFID tower and these methodologies provide monitoring and surveillance applications (i.e., warehouse, tracking of any movement, and parking management system). Multiple experiments are done to validate the coverage and repeatability of the developed prototype of the proposed system.
RAIN RFID is an established platform for embedded battery-less and low-power sensing in the pharmaceutical sector, with particular potential for monitoring environmental conditions directly at the primary-package level. Its transition from technology demonstrations to industrial use, however, requires the package, sensing node, and reader infrastructure to be jointly designed and qualified as a complete measurement system. This paper presents a system-level design and qualification framework for RAIN RFID sensing in pharmaceutical applications, integrating and extending existing technological and experimental results across the complete package–sensor–reader chain. The framework combines package-driven electromagnetic integration, sensing-IC selection and metrological characterization, and measurement-oriented reader qualification. The proposed methodology is examined across representative workflows spanning pharmaceutical development, manufacturing, and cold-chain logistics, while the requirements for transition toward GxP-regulated use are critically discussed. Overall, the work provides transferable engineering guidelines for progressing from individual RFID sensing demonstrations toward reproducible, qualifiable, and scalable pharmaceutical measurement systems.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Integrated Circuits (ICs) have recently been explored as battery-less, wirelessly programmable control nodes for reconfigurable electromagnetic devices. However, existing implementations typically rely on multiple ICs to actuate individual tunable elements or small subsets, leaving controller-count scalability as an open issue. This paper addresses this limitation by experimentally demonstrating single-node actuation of 400 distributed varactor diodes using a single passive RFID IC. The varactors share a common binary state and are integrated into a 10x10 reconfigurable Frequency Selective Surface (FSS), whose embedded bias network eliminates the need for local power supplies, external wired bias interfaces, and additional control electronics. Direct characterization shows that the complete load increases the controller operation sensitivity by approximately 4 dB, matching the increase previously observed with a single varactor, while preserving a stable output voltage of about 1.8 V. RFID-based actuation also produces an electromagnetic response substantially equivalent to conventional DC biasing.
This paper investigates the performance of an integrated sensing and backscatter communication (ISABC) system in simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted vehicular non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. The STAR-RIS simultaneously supports signal transmission and reflection to enhance both sensing and communication functionalities, and target vehicle is equipped with the radio frequency identification tag to accurately predict the vehicle’s identity. By characterizing vehicular links using first-order autoregressive process, we derive the closedform statistical distributions of the end-to-end channel gain magnitudes of both communication users and tag-enabled sensing target using Gamma approximation method. Utilizing them, we then analyze the system’s communication performance by deriving the analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) and ergodic rate, and system throughput for both the near and far user vehicles over Rayleigh fading channels. Furthermore, we deduce the asymptotic OPs of near as well as far vehicles in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime to reveal their diversity orders. Moreover, the system’s sensing performance is evaluated in terms of ergodic sensing rate and target detection probability. Further, to reliably identify the tagged-enabled moving vehicle, we analyze the vehicle identification success probability of the considered system. We also analytically discuss about the system’s energy efficiency. The analytical findings are verified using numerical and simulations results under diverse channel and system configurations. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed scheme is compared with benchmark approaches, such as orthogonal multiple access and half-duplex decode-and-forward relay-assisted communication.
A UHF RFID link combines antenna coupling, power harvesting, modulation, and receiver cancellation in a single electromagnetic-circuit problem. This paper develops a SPICE-compatible model for that link by representing the free-space interaction between a reader antenna and a tag antenna as a mutual-impedance two-port. Starting from the induced-EMF formulation for two half-wave dipoles at 900MHz, the mutual impedance is reduced to circuit elements that can be embedded directly in a transient SPICE deck. The resulting model is checked against the induced-EMF calculation, the Friis far-field limit, and an independent full-wave Method-of-Moments solution of the same dipole pair, which agrees with the coupling ratio to within about one percent. This model is then used in an end-to-end passive RFID simulation including reader carrier generation, tag rectification, ASK envelope detection, backscatter modulation, coherent reader I/Q cancellation, and polarization mismatch. The approach preserves the circuit designer’s view of the system while retaining an explicit electromagnetic coupling term, allowing antenna placement, tag loading, harvested supply behavior, and reader baseband response to be evaluated in one simulation environment. The present implementation does not mesh the intervening space. Instead, it uses the Maxwell-derived mutual impedance as a reduced electromagnetic two-port and embeds that two-port in SPICE. This provides a practical circuit-level link model for RFID simulation, while preserving a clear path toward a full Kron-lattice formulation in which the coupling is produced by the discretized medium rather than inserted as a precomputed element.
