Multi-reader multi-tag architecture for UWB/UHF radio frequency identification systems

Within the overall framework of the GRETA project, this contribution proposes a novel protocol architecture that efficiently integrates UHF and UWB radio components in order to improve the performance of identification algorithms in large scale deployments that potentially involve large populations of tags and multiple readers. We move from our recent work, where we have shown that an UWB-enhanced architecture, that guarantees full backward compatibility with ISO/IEC 18000-6C UHF standard, can improve by approximately 25% the performance in terms of success rate and energy consumption. The second step is concerned with the proposal of a further tag identification protocol, that is based on compressive sensing (CS) and UWB: the main feature of the proposed scheme is that it exploits UWB information to reduce the ID search space of CS decoding. This hybrid technique is still oriented to further decrease the speed in tag identification, while reducing the computational complexity if compared to an UHF-RFID only protocol. Finally, we extend our approach to the case of multiple readers, that do not only improve coverage, but can also further improve the performance indexes: in this case a cooperative approach is proposed in order to also manage readertag collisions and reader-reader collisions other than the typical tag-tag collisions.