Enabling Multi-Frequency and Wider-band RFID Sensing using COTS Device

RFID shows great potentials to build useful sensing applications. However, current RFID sensing can obtain mainly a single-dimensional sensing measurement from each reader-to-tag query, such as phase, RSS, etc. This is sufficient to fulfill the designs that are bound to the tag’s movement, e.g., the localization of tags. However, it imposes inevitable uncertainty on many sensing tasks relying on the features extracted from the RFID signals. These traditional sensing measurements limit the fidelity of RFID sensing fundamentally and prevent its broader usage in more sophisticated sensing scenarios. This paper presents RF-Wise to push the limit of RFID-based sensing, motivated by an insightful observation to customize RFID signals. RF-Wise can enrich the existing single-dimensional feature measure to a channel state information (CSI)-like measure with up to 150-dimensional samples across different frequencies concurrently. More importantly, RF-Wise is a software solution atop the standard EPC Gen2 protocol without using any extra hardware. It requires only one tag for sensing and works within the ISM band. RF-Wise, so far as we know, is the first system of such a kind. Extensive experiments show that RF-Wise does not impact underlying RFID communications, while by using the features extracted by RF-Wise, applications’ sensing performance can be improved remarkably. The source codes of RF-Wise are available at https://cui-zhao.github.io/RF-WISE/. © 2024 IEEE.