Thesis title
Application of the time reversal technique to radio-frequency identification technology
Thesis subject
The thesis focuses on the study of waveform optimisation in the context of radio-frequency identification (RFID). This is a flexible solution allowing the design of waveforms and assessment of their energy performance in an ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID link according to the Generation-2 standard protocol ISO/IEC 18000. To model a UHF RFID system, two levels of simulation are planned. A simulation at system level (circuit model) including the transmitter, the modelled channel and the receiver will use ANSYS Designer interfaced with Matlab. And a simulation at physical layer level (electromagnetic model) including the emitting and receiving antennas and the propagation environment will use ANSYS HFSS.
From a practical viewpoint, the experiment considered comprises a reader emulated by a LabVIEW interface, controlling the radio-frequency lab instruments, which performs real-time tag response detection. Its interconnection with the MATLAB routines enables arbitrary RFID waveform design and assessment. Three waveforms can be studied with RFID Waveformer in a complex propagation environment: the pulsed wave (PW) and time reversal (TR) methods will be compared with the traditional continuous wave (CW) method. The aim of this research is to improve the energy efficiency of the forward link and therefore the RFID reading range compared with the CW method. The viability of RFID Waveformer will be confirmed for tag response detection in the three aforementioned methods. Because RFID Waveformer is easy to use and allows for repeatability of measurements, it is a versatile solution that can be extended to other contexts. The idea will be to test it for other system applications.
