Estimation of UHF RFID Reading Regions in Real Environments

The reading range is one of the most critical performance indicators of radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems. It depends on many physical and geometrical parameters. Typically, in the ultra-high-frequency band (UHF: 860 MHz to 960 MHz), the maximum size of the reading region is estimated by the free-space propagation model. This is based on the Friis formula, even if much more accurate predictions may be accomplished nowadays by time-consuming electromagnetic simulations, accounting for the antennas and the interaction with the nearby environment. This paper proposes a general parameterization of the three-dimensional reading region. This done having introduced all of the accessible system data, such as the emitted power, the reader and tag-over-object radiation patterns, and also the interrogation duty cycle, the scenario features, and the safety regulation constraints. Within this framework, the opportunity and some improvements of the free-space model are analyzed. They are compared with measurements and with more-accurate three-dimensional simulations of realistic environments. The discussion demonstrates the validity range of the free-space approximations, and evaluates the improvement achieved by including the main interactions with the environment. The derived formulas are ready to use and to be applied for the planning and optimization of reader-tag networks.