Experimental Performance Evaluation of Passive UHF RFID Tags in Electromagnetically Critical Supply Chains

Radio Frequency Identification is going to play a veryimportant role as auto-identification solution for manyapplication scenarios, where item-level tagging and highperformance are crucial. In such a context, the use of passive Ultra High Frequency (UHF) tags is strongly suggested but, unfortunately...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Luca Catarinucci, Riccardo Colella, Mario De Blasi, Luigi Patrono, Luciano Tarricone
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Croatian Communications and Information Society (CCIS) 2011-06-01
Series:Journal of Communications Software and Systems
Subjects:
Online Access:https://jcomss.fesb.unist.hr/index.php/jcomss/article/view/179
Description
Summary:Radio Frequency Identification is going to play a veryimportant role as auto-identification solution for manyapplication scenarios, where item-level tagging and highperformance are crucial. In such a context, the use of passive Ultra High Frequency (UHF) tags is strongly suggested but, unfortunately, general-purpose commercial tags could not meet all the requirements in presence of critical operating conditions, including the presence of metals and liquids, the misalignment between tag and reader antennas, and the need of multiple reading of tags. In this paper, the main features that a UHF tag should own to work properly in the whole supply chain are presented. A tag, named below Enhanced tag, satisfying all theindividuated requirements has been also realized and validated in a controlled test environment simulating the pharmaceutical supply chain. Tests have been focused on the above-mentioned critical conditions. The performance of the Enhanced tag, in terms of successful read rate, has been compared with that of some commercial Far Field and Near Field UHF tags. The experimental results are impressive and clearly demonstrate that ad hoc Far Field UHF tags are able to effectively solve many of the performance degradation problems affecting generalpurpose tags. Finally, the proposed tag has been also tested in extreme conditions, applying it directly on Tetra Pak packages containing liquid, with interesting results in terms of platformtolerant features.
ISSN:1845-6421
1846-6079