Empirical Study of Post-Envelope Detection Receive

Diversity Combining for Passive UHF RFID Tags

Leonard Bryan B. Paet and Joel Joseph S. Marciano Jr.*
Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute
University of the Philippines, Diliman Campus
Quezon City, Philippines 1101
E-mail: lenard@eee.upd.edu.ph, *j.marciano@ieee.org
are affected by various factors; one of which is small-scale flat
fading caused by multipath propagation. Small-scale multipath
fading is characterized by rapid fluctuations in the amplitudes,
phases, and multipath delays of an RF signal as it passes
through the cluttered wireless channel [3]. For UHF RFID
systems operating on the far-field, this translates to field nulls
or points in space where the field strength is not enough to
sustain reliable communication between a reader and a tag [4].
Several approaches to combat this problem have been
previously explored for other wireless communication systems
[3][5]. Spatial diversity is one approach that involves multiple
antennas separated from one another. Received signals from
these antennas are processed according to some combining
scheme to improve the signal reception. Due to the expanding
array of applications for UHF RFID systems, there is greater
demand for improving its read range and read reliability.
Therefore, the incorporation of diversity schemes into UHF
RFID systems has recently been an interesting topic for
research.

Abstract The concept of incorporating receive diversity

combining schemes into UHF RFID tags is presented in this
work. The inclusion of the said schemes into RFID tags is
employed as a possible solution to the effects of multipath
propagation on the reader-to-tag (R->T) wireless link which
reduce the read range and degrade the read reliability of current
passive RFID systems. To explore this concept, the authors
constructed reader and tag emulation platforms using National
Instruments PXI hardware modules and LabVIEW software
programs for modeling the R->T communications link. The
reader emulation platform was used to model the transmit
section of an RFID reader and is capable of transmitting userpredetermined sequences of RFID commands. The tag emulation
platform was used to model the receive section of a single- or
multi-antenna RFID tag. These two platforms were utilized as a
testbed for developing and testing the following 2-channel
diversity combining schemes for UHF RFID tags: (1) selection
diversity combining (SDC), (2) post-detection direct additive
combining (DACP), and (3) post-detection ratio squared
combining (RSCP). Experiments were conducted to determine
the read range and read reliability performance. Results of these
experiments show that a maximum of 26.67% improvement in
the read range and a maximum of 16.64% improvement in the
read reliability of UHF RFID systems can be obtained by
integrating receive diversity schemes into RFID tags.
Improvements were recorded even for tag antenna spacings as
low as 0.05.

Most of the previous work related to improving the read

range of UHF RFID systems dealt with implementing some
form of spatial diversity and multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO) scheme on the reader side. This is due to the fewer
constraints on computational complexity and power on the
reader. In [6], it was shown that by using singular value
decomposition to obtain transmit and backscatter channel
matrices, a four-fold improvement in read range was achieved
using four transmit and four receive antennas in the reader.
This approach, however, requires that the reader have a perfect
knowledge of the wireless channel. Another example of using
spatial diversity in RFID readers is presented in [7], which
implemented the Maximal-Ratio Combining (MRC) technique
in a RFID reader through a Field Programmable Gate Array
(FPGA). The functionality of the system was demonstrated;
however, the actual benefits in terms of extension of read range
or coverage were not presented.

Keywords-spatial diversity, multi-antenna signal processing,

passive UHF RFID, EPC Gen 2 RFID

I.

INTRODUCTION

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an emerging

wireless communications technology for automated item
identification and remote sensing applications [1]. RFID
technology is rapidly becoming prevalent in applications such
as pallet-level tracking, inventory management, and vehicular
traffic management and has also found its way into
unconventional applications such as real-time location services
(RTLS) and ubiquitous sensing networks. These new
demanding applications push the limits of current RFID
systems, bringing new challenges to the fore and unlocking
new and interesting areas for research and development.

The use of multi-antenna spatial diversity combining

schemes on the tag side, specifically for passive UHF tags, has
not received as much attention however. This is despite the
acknowledgment that the read range of such systems is limited
primarily by the power received by the tag on the reader-to-tag
link [2]. This may be attributed to the limited computational
resources available on the tag transponder, which relies on the
incident radio frequency wave for power. Given the small form

For passive UHF RFID systems, a challenge that needs to

be addressed is the limited and unreliable read range of the
system [2]. The read range and read reliability of these systems

978-1-4577-0255-6/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

773

TENCON 2011

factor and power-limited nature of passive RFID tags, the

incorporation of such techniques may seem currently
unfeasible. Advances in low-power electronics and signal
processing, however, hold promise for future (passive) RFID
systems to benefit from such additional complexity. Several
patent and patent application claims [8][9][10] recognize this
possibility and have proposed techniques for spatially
combining signals on multiple tag antennas aimed at extending
the RFID read range. These documents are able to present
rough sketches of possible diversity implementations in RFID
tags but are unable to provide detailed performance
characterizations for their implementation.

Figure 2.

The reader platform is able to transmit reader waveforms

conformant to EPC C1G2 UHF RFID standards and the FCC
Part 15 regulations [11] for use in automated tests. In
particular, the reader waveforms that it generates are verified
to conform to the following protocol specifications
summarized by Table I.

In this paper, the authors investigate the possibility of

improving the read range and read reliability of passive UHF
RFID systems by incorporating spatial receive diversity
combining techniques on RF tags. Sections II and III describe
the reader and tag emulation platforms that serve as a testbed
for conducting experiments on spatial receive diversity for
passive UHF RFID tags. Section IV summarizes the results of
experiments done using the said platforms and provides an
analysis of said results. We conclude the paper in Section V
and provide recommendations for future work.
II.

Program flowchart for reader transmitter emulation platform

III.

TAG RECEIVER EMULATION PLATFORM

In this section we describe the hardware emulation platform

used for modeling the receive section of an EPC C1G2compliant passive UHF RFID tag.
A. Hardware Component
Fig. 3 shows the hardware block diagram for the tag
receiver emulation platform. This platform is used to model the
receive section of a single or multi-antenna UHF RFID tag. Its
hardware section is composed of the PXIe-8108 Embedded
Controller, the PXI-5652 RF Signal Generator, the PXIe-5622
16 bit IF Digitizer, the PXIe-5601RF Downconverter and
custom-made UHF printed dipole antennas. The NI PXI-1075
chassis placed on a movable rack while the two printed dipole
antennas were mounted on stand at a fixed height of 4 feet.

READER TRANSMITTER EMULATION PLATFORM

The hardware emulation platform for the transmit section of

the RFID reader, which conforms to the EPC Class 1
Generation 2 (EPC C1G2) UHF RFID protocol, is described
here.
A. Hardware Component
Fig. 1 shows the hardware block diagram of the reader
transmitter emulation platform. It is used to approximate the
operation of a real UHF RFID reader transmit section. It is
composed of the following modules from National Instruments
and external hardware: PXIe-8108 Embedded Controller, PXI5652 RF Signal Generator, PXIe-5450 I/Q Waveform
Generator, PXIe-5611 I/Q Vector Modulator and a Cushcraft
S9028PC 902-928 MHz 8 dBic square patch antenna.

TABLE I.
Parameter
Modulation
Center Freq
Signal BW

B. Software Component
A LabVIEW Virtual Instrument (VI) was written to control
the operation of the reader emulation platform. An illustration
describing the program sequence is shown in Fig. 2. First, it
gathers relevant RFID R->T input parameters such as preamble
values, power-up/power-down duration, and reader command
sequence. These parameters are used to generate PIE encoded
sequences that are subsequently processed to generate a
complex baseband message waveform. This waveform is then
upconverted to the UHF band for transmission.

Delimiter
TARI
PW
RTCal
TRCal

SUMMARY OF SPECIFICATIONS FOR THE READER

TRANSMITTER EMULATION PLATFORM
Min
Max
Target
DSB-ASK, SSB-ASK, or
PR-ASK
860
960
915
500
12.5 12.5
12.5
5%
+5%
12.5 12.5
12.5
1%
+1%
0.265
0.525
0.4
2.75 2.75
2.75
1%
+1%
1.1
3
2

Actual

Units

DSB-ASK
915.004
400

MHz
kHz

12.1875

us

12.5

us

0.375

TARI

2.75

TARI

RTCal

B. Software Component
Passive UHF RFID tags follow a typical architecture as
shown in Fig. 4 [12]. The main components of the receive
section of the tag are the following: (1) power harvester, (2)
ASK demodulator, and (3) baseband processor. The tag power
harvester is usually composed of a voltage multiplier and a
voltage regulator. It is responsible for powering up the tag. The
ASK demodulator, on the other hand, is made up of a simple
envelope detector which allows it to directly demodulate the
RF signals coming from the reader and send them to the

Figure 1. Reader transmitter emulator hardware block diagram

774

setting either signal weight a or b to 1 and setting the other to

0. For 1NC, only one of the signal paths is connected to the
output-combined signal. 2SDC, on the other hand, finds the
signal path with the higher average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
and switches it in. This average SNR computation and
switching operation takes place every 100 s, taking into
account practical considerations for implementation on actual
tags. For 2DACP and 2RSCP, both signal paths are connected
to the output every time. For 2DACP, the weight gains a and b
are set equal and are fixed to 1. For 2RSCP, on the other
hand, a and b are set to be directly proportional to the RMS
signal level and inversely proportional to the mean square noise
level for each receive channel. In that sense, 2DACP and
2RSCP are related to the Equal Gain Combining (EGC) and
Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) schemes discussed in [13],
respectively, except for the absence of phase information, as
the signals are being combined after envelope detection. The
computations of the signal and noise values for each channel as
well as the updates on the signal path weights also take place
every 100 s.

baseband processor. The baseband processor then decodes the

envelope-detected signal and extracts the RFID commands.

Figure 3. Tag receiver emulator hardware block diagram

As can be seen from Fig. 4, with the exception of the

baseband processor, the tag receive section is mostly
implemented using analog circuitry. These analog components
were implemented digitally in LabVIEW, which controls the
hardware tag emulator. The main VI code diagram for the tag
emulation platform is shown in Fig. 5.
C. Integration of Diversity Combining Schemes
Using the LabVIEW software components developed for
the tag emulation platform, the following diversity techniques
for RFID tags were investigated:

1-Channel No Diversity (1NC)

2-Channel Selection Diversity Combining (2SDC)

2-Channel PostEnvelope Detection Direct Additive

Combining (2DACP)

2-Channel PostEnvelope Detection Ratio Squared

Combining (2DACP)
Figure 5. Illustration of the VI block diagram for baseband
processor/command decoder

IV.

DIVERSITY TESTING AND RESULTS

A series of tests were conducted in order to determine the

possible improvements in read range and read reliability that
can be obtained by the incorporation of diversity combining
schemes into RFID tags.
A. Testing Area
A small room measuring approximately 6 meters long x 4.8
meters wide x 3.4 meters tall was appropriated as a testing area
for the experiment. For this test, the reader transmitter platform
was fixed in the corner of the room, as shown in Fig. 6. Also
shown is a straight path measuring 6.096 m (20 ft) long, which
is used as a guide for a movable rack with the tag emulator
hardware. The position of the tag antennas was varied along the
straight path from 0.6m to 6m away from the reader antenna in
steps of 0.3m (1 ft). The testing area also shows tables
containing random objects that will serve as scatterers in the
wireless channel.

Figure 4. Typical architecture for passive UHF RFID tags, from [12]

by:

The implementation of linear receive diversity is described

S = aX1 + bX2

(1)

where X1,X2 denotes the received signals from the two tag
antennas after envelope detection; a,b correspond to the real
valued weights for the two signal paths; and S is the output
combined signal to be processed by decoder. For 1NC and
2SDC, only one of the signal paths is connected to the output at
any given time. The program switches in a signal path by

775

B. Hardware Setup
The tag antennas were mounted side by side, with four
different tag antenna spacings used: 0.05, 0.1, 0.3, and 0.5.
The value of the wavelength is roughly equal to 32.76 cm.

'%' are inside the read coverage of the RFID setup, while read
distances with an 'x' are outside the read coverage. As an
example of performance comparison, it can be seen from Fig.
7 that both 2SDC and 2RSCP have 18 read distances inside its
read range, while the control setups Ant1_0.05 and
Ant2_0.05 have 15 read distances inside its read range. From
this, the ratio 18 over 15 was computed, which corresponds to
a read range improvement of 20%.

C. Software Setup
The test involved using the reader platform to transmit
predetermined command sequences to the tag emulator. The
tag will then receive and interpret these commands for different
reader-to-tag antenna distances. For every measurement point,
20000 RFID commands were sent at bursts of 1000 commands
every 3 seconds. The number of correctly received commands
is then recorded. This experiment was repeated for each of the
four tag antenna spacings. In the experiment, the reader was
made to transmit RFID commands at a scaled-down EIRP of
+6 dBm (0 dBm output + 6 dBi antenna gain). Since actual
readers transmit at +36 dBm EIRP and tags have a power-on
threshold of -14 dBm, the power-on threshold for the tag
emulator was also scaled to -44 dBm.
To accommodate simultaneous testing of the different
combining schemes, the experiment was conducted by having
the tag emulator store the collected data over the air on a
storage drive via direct memory access (DMA) transfers. The
different tag receive diversity schemes were then made to read
the data from the storage drive and process them in the same
way as they would if the data was collected in real time.
D. Experimental Results
A plot of the experimental results on the performance of the
implemented diversity techniques at a tag antenna spacing of
0.05 is shown in Fig. 7. The columns labeled Ant1_0.05 and
Ant2_0.05 correspond to the results for the single tag antenna
control setup that separately use Antenna 1 and Antenna 2,
respectively. The other labeled columns contain the results for
the diversity schemes being tested.

Figure 7. Results for 2SDC, 2DACP, and 2RSCP for 0.05 spacing

It is also observed from Fig. 7 that at ranges up to about

2.44m, the read rates are all 100% indicating a good, coherent
channel at these locations. With a coherent channel, selection
diversity offers no additional gain while multi-antenna
combining techniques may provide gain through beamforming
instead of diversity [3]. At farther distances from the reader, it
is noted that there is potential for diversity even at relatively
small spacing of 0.05. For example, the drastically different
read rates at 3.35m, 3.96m, 4.27m, etc. obtained from the
single antenna suggests a largely incoherent channel at the two
closely spaced locations. On the other hand, there is a point,
such as at 5.18m, where the antennas are possibly caught in a
deep channel fade that spans more than the 0.05 antenna
separation. In this case, the selection and combining techniques
used here become ineffective.
The discrepancies in the performance of the 2DC relative to
the single antenna receiver, such as at a distance of 2.74m,
points to a possible sub-optimal implementation of the scheme.
This may be due to the inaccurate estimation of the
instantaneous SNR, which is performed every 100s. The
optimal setting of the SNR estimation frequency also needs
further investigation.

Figure 6. Hardware setup for read range testing

The percentage of reader commands successfully read by the

tag was observed for each diversity setup in order to assess the
read range or coverage performance. For every column
corresponding to a diversity setup, read distances with a o
marker denote a 100% read percentage, read distances with a
numerical percentage value denote 0.99% - 99.99% read
percentage, and read distances with an 'x' marker denote zero
read percentage. This means that read distances with 'o' and

The read reliability factor for each diversity setup is defined

here as the average of the read percentages over 19 read
distances. From Fig.9, it is seen that the 2SDC achieves a read
reliability factor of 88.863% at 0.05 spacing. This offers an
improvement over the single antenna control setup which
offers a read reliability of 78.868%. A summary of the results

776

reliability, respectively, can be obtained by integrating receive

diversity schemes into RFID tags. These improvements were
recorded even for tag antenna spacings as low as 0.05.

for the other tag antenna spacings is shown in Table II. Based
on this summary, the following observations may be made: (1)
the 2-antenna selection and combining techniques were
generally able to improve the performance of the system in
terms of read range and read reliability at the antenna spacings
considered; (2) the 2DACP scheme, while the easiest to
implement, offers the lowest improvement in read reliability.
The passive combining used in this particular scheme does not
take into account the noise level at each antenna and may
therefore be enhancing the noise at the output. Moreover, at
some locations the passive combination may instead be
resulting in destructive interference due to phase incoherence at
the two antenna locations; and (3) the 2RSCP scheme offers
the best performance with a maximum read range improvement
of 26.67% and a maximum read reliability improvement of
16.64%. This is achieved at the price of additional complexity,
specifically through the incorporation of the noise level when
computing the relative antenna weights.
TABLE II.

More quantitative experiments are recommended to verify

the promising results presented in this study. Moreover, the
study has focused on so-called post-detection combining
schemes, where signal are combined after envelope detection.
Future investigations may also be conducted for pre-envelope
detection combining, where phase information of arriving
signals is preserved and may be taken advantage of for more
optimal combining.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was made possible by the SODERA project with
funding from the Engineering Research and Development for
Technology (ERDT) program of the Department of Science
and Technology (DOST).
REFERENCES

SUMMARY OF EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS FOR 2SDC, 2DACP,

AND 2RSCP

2Rx Selection Diversity Combining (2SDC)

Performance
%Improvement
Metric
0.05
0.1
0.3
0.5
Read Range
20.00
20.00
18.75
5.56
Read Reliability
9.99
7.77
10.29
4.97

[1]
AVE

[2]

16.0775
8.255

[3]

2Rx Post-Detection Direct Additive Combining (2DACP)

Performance
%Improvement
Metric
0.05
0.1
0.3
0.5
AVE
Read Range
13.33
6.67
12.5
5.56
9.515
Read Reliability
6.90
4.33
10.53
5.27
6.7575

[4]

[5]

2Rx Post-Detection Ratio Squared Combining (2RSCP)

Performance
%Improvement
Metric
0.05
0.1
0.3
0.5
AVE
Read Range
20.00
26.67
18.75
5.56
17.745
Read Reliability
15.84
16.64
11.06
5.27
12.2025

[6]

[7]

V.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

In this paper, reader and tag emulation platforms were

constructed for modeling the R->T communications link of a
passive UHF RFID system that conforms to the EPC Class 1
Generation 2 protocol. These two emulation platforms were
used as a testbed for developing and testing several diversity
combining schemes for UHF RFID tags. The following 2channel post-envelope detection combining techniques for
passive UHF RFID tags were explored: (1) selection diversity
combining (SDC), (2) post-detection direct additive combining
(DACP), and (3) post-detection ratio squared combining
(RSCP). Results of these experiments show that a maximum of
26.67% and 16.64% improvement in read range and read

[8]
[9]
[10]

[11]
[12]

[13]

777

V. D. Hunt, A. Puglia, and M. Puglia, RFID: A Guide to Radio

Frequency Identification, Wiley-Interscience, 2007.
P. V. Nikitin and K. V. S. Rao, Performance Limitations of Passive
UHF RFID Systems, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium, pp.
1011-1014, 2006.
T. S. Rappaport, Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice,
Prentice-Hall, 2002.
S. R. Banerjee, R. Jesme, and R. A. Sainati, Performance Analysis of
Short Range UHF Propagation as Applicable to Passive RFID, IEEE
Int. Conf. on RFID, Texas, USA, 2007.
M. Henze, J. D. Parsons, P. A. Ratliff, and M. J. Withers, Diversity
Techniques for Mobile Radio Reception, IEEE Trans. on Vehicular
Technology, Vol. 25, No. 3, August 1976.
M. A. Ingram, M. F. Demirkol, and D. Kim, Transmit Diversity and
Spatial Multiplexing for RF Links Using Modulated Backscatter, In
Proc. International Symposium on Signals, Systems, and Electronics
(ISSSE '01), July 2001.
C. Angerer, R. Langweiser, G. Maier, and M. Rupp, Maximal Ratio
Combining Receivers for Dual Antenna RFID Readers, IEEE MTT-S
Int. Microwave Workshop on Wireless Sensing, Local Positioning and
RFID (IMWS 2009), Croatia, Sept. 2009.
D. Duan and D. Friedman, Cascaded DC voltages of multiple antenna
RF tag front-end circuits, US patent 6243013.
J. Hyde, O. Onen, and R. A. Oliver, RFID Tags Combining Signals
Received From Multiple RF Ports, US patent 7423539.
P. V. Nikitin, K. V. S. Rao, and S. Lam, RFID Tags with Enhanced
Range Obtained by Spatial Antenna Diversity, US patent application
20090219158.
FCC Regulations Part 15 Section 247, 2004.
C. F. Chan et al., A Low-Power Signal Processing Front-End and
Decoder for UHF Passive RFID Transponders, IEEE International
Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS '09), Taipei, Taiwan, 2009.
D. G. Brennan, Linear Diversity Combining Techniques, Proceedings
of the IEEE , vol. 91, no. 2, pp. 331- 356, 2003.