A digital receiver architecture for RFID readers

Abstract

This paper presents a digital receiver architecture for an RFID reader. The main challenge in RFID reader design is the detection of the backscattered signals from the tags, which can be severely complicated due to the largely varying scale of possible receive powers. Furthermore noise, which power depends on the environment can degrade the detection performance. The detection of the signals of the tags is additionally impeded by the very strong self interference at the reader with the carrier it needs to send in order to supply the tags with energy. To fight these various disturbances, a new RFID receiver algorithm is proposed, that sets its decision threshold adaptively, depending on the strength of the input signal, the noise power at the receiver and the extent of the carrier interference. This is the first algorithm for signal detection in RFID, setting its threshold accordingly to the environmental conditions, and thus leading to near optimum performance. Details of the implementation of the digital receiver architecture on an FPGA are introduced. Bit error ratio measurements have been carried out to rate the receivers performance, which have never been shown before for RFID receivers. Presented measurement results substantiate the performance of the suggested algorithm.