Hybrid Extension of a Flexible Software Defined RFID Reader

Abstract

A hybrid solution for a software defined RFID reader is presented in this work. Commercial RFID systems operate at a level, where only a restrictive amount of parameters are configurable and transparency is not given. Therefore these systems cannot be configured to make them tailored to specific applications. For that reason, a flexible software reader providing these requirements is used as the starting point of this work. This software reader is an open source project by CGran, based on a software defined radio and a USRP hardware frontend. However the flexibility is paid for by a time critical communication of the USB transfer between USRP and PC host. A hybrid concept was developed to improve this time critical application and reduce the maximum required delay for a response. The following design intends to transfer the transmission components to the hardware, where it is controlled by short commands, instead of sending the transmission data sample wise by the software reader. It is shown that this solution achieves a better performance due to a decreased response delay and furthermore provides a backward compatibility to the original concept of the software reader.