A SPECTRALLY-EFFICIENT RFID SYSTEM BASED ON OFDM MODULATION

With the growing interest in backscatter communications and massive deployment of Internet-of-things (IoT) solutions in industry, the necessity for a robust, reliable, and fast backscatter system is of great importance. This project proposal aims for developing a spectrally-efficient backscatter communications module for future radio- frequency identification (RFID) devices. By utilizing orthogonal-frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme, RFID systems can benefit in two perspectives: First, the narrow-band nature of the OFDM subcarriers results in a more immune-to-fading communication link, which is more critical in the backscatter link compared to the standard communication link since fading is effectively doubled. Second, as a result of the frequency-flat nature of the subcarrier, more effective bandwidth could be used, which in turn yields a faster communication link. This proposal focuses on the investigation of the feasibility of implementing OFDM scheme in RFID systems. In particular, the proposal aims for studying the bestcost- and space-wiselocation (in the tag or reader) of implementing OFDM modulation. Therefore, the main objective of the proposed research is to develop an OFDM RFID system operating at 5.8 GHz.