1000-RF-tag emulation with an 8bit micro processor

UHF band passive RFID is an essential identification technology in pervasive computing world. One of the industrial demands to UHF band passive RFID is fast reading of many RF tags. This is particularly relevant for item-level-tagging of CDs, DVDs, books and consumer electronics. Many high-speed MAC protocols have been proposed thus far. Quantitative evaluation of reading speed, however, is not easy because we need to lay out many RF tags and measure the reading durations usually through interrogator APIs, which differ from interrogator to interrogator. In this paper, the authors propose two efficient multiple RF tag emulation algorithms which leverage the probabilistic nature of MAC protocol. We have implemented the algorithms onto a programmable battery assisted passive tag (BAP), equipped with an 8bit micro processor and evaluated the reading speed of commercial interrogators. It was revealed that the BAP can efficiently emulate the behavior of more than 1000 Gen2 RF tags for the reading speed evaluation with a trivial penalty on accuracy.