A multi-purpose UHF RFID Tag Emulator for Communication Protocols Testing

Although protocols for RFID communications may seem to be well defined and standards duly established, there is still ground for improvement. New ideas may lead to increased performance or provide new capabilities for the tags. These may lead to new features as the incorporation of encryption in the communications between tags and readers; which is a recurring challenge in many new applications. And there are other research lines that would also benefit from the possibilities that could bring alternative communication protocols, as would be the case of tag location. However, most research being done on RFID either use standard protocols and equipment or do not include physical results under real conditions and with real components. Which is usually due to the implicit difficulty of adequately customizing the chips in the tags to implement the proposed solutions in order to perform the required testing. This paper presents the implementation process of a realistic platform for tag emulation. This platform makes possible the study and analysis of communication protocols to be used in passive UHF-RFID technology under real conditions and interacting with real and commercial components. The resulting system is a new configurable test-bench that can be adapted for different applications as shown in some examples.