MIMO Radio Frequency Identification: A Brief Survey

In this paper, we briefly look at the latest state-ot-the-art in the domain of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radio frequency identification (RFID) systems while detailing the work done in the domain of anti-collision, range enhancements, bit error rate (BER) improvements and security. Various passive ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID implementations are considered that employ multiple antennas at the reader and single or multiple antennas at each tag. We look at several recent works those explored MIMO for RFID receivers. When using MIMO at the backscatter channel, significant improvements can be achieved in the BER as well as range extension. With the extra reliability and increased throughput, such systems can be deployed in many important applications like large tag reading scenarios and accurate tracking. Increased throughput is directly dependent on estimation of tag quantity in a bulk reading environment and usually estimators designed for single antenna systems under-perform in such settings causing low signal to noise ratio (SNR) when employed in MIMO systems where tag signal overlapping can happen more often. One of the key challenges is to keep the design of the RFID tag simple, cutting cost and power requirement when employing anti-collision schemes. We provide a brief survey in some of the recent developments related to MIMO RFID systems, the protocols and algorithms used, and improvements achieved.