Passive UWB RFID for Tag Localization: Architectures and Design

In the new scenarios foreseen by the Internet of Things, industrial and commercial systems will be required to detect and localize tagged items with high accuracy, as well as to monitor the level of certain parameters of interest through the deployment of wireless sensors. To meet these challenging requirements, the adoption of passive and semi-passive ultra-wideband (UWB) radio-frequency identification (RFID) appears a promising solution, which overcomes the limitations of standard Gen.2 ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID. The design and implementation of such systems pose several practical constraints, impacting the overall network architecture. In this paper, the main issues and challenging aspects for the design of a UWB-RFID network considering architectural and protocol choices are discussed in a unitary framework, and practical solutions, accounting for the presented issues, are proposed. Moreover, the possible integration of UWB-RFID with standard Gen.2 UHF-RFID is proposed as an interesting option, discussing architectural solutions, their advantages, and drawbacks.