A Flexible Software Radio Transceiver for UHF RFID Experimentation : UW TR : UW-CSE-09-1002

We present the design and evaluation of a flexible UHF RFID reader suited for experimentation. Our reader is built using the USRP software radio platform in conjunction with software we developed in the GNU Radio framework. We believe this is the first inexpensive tool that readily enables changes to the physical and MAC layer of RFID systems. Our reader further has sufficient performance to interoperate with commercial EPC Gen-2 RFID tags and achieves roughly 75% of the range of a commercial reader with comparable power. To support communication with commodity RFID tags, we aggressively reduced system latency from the 10s of milliseconds typical of USRP applications to consistently under 500 μs.