A UHF RFID channel emulator hardware for playback of measured link-scenarios

This paper introduces a simple and inexpensive approach for emulating recorded radio frequency identification (RFID) link scenarios in the lab. This allows for developing and testing of RFID systems, improving their performance…under perfectly reproducible conditions. Hence, it becomes possible to precisely compare the performance of different reader settings (data rate, modulation, arbitration mode…) or to compare different readers and/or tags. Comparison in this case includes statistical analysis of the performance as well. The proposed setup further enables statistical analysis of the results as the emulation of a certain link scenario can be played back arbitrary often. This work discusses the channel emulation for an 815/915 MHz RFID system: The recording of scenarios, the ‘connectorization’ of RFID-tags, and the channel emulator itself. Finally, exemplary test results of a commercial RFID reader connected to the emulator are presented.