At IEEE RFID Conference, Passive Tags Talk With Each Other, Contact Lenses Help Control Diabetes

The annual event, co-located with RFID Journal LIVE!, has led to technical education, networking and innovation among attendees and presenters.
Published: May 16, 2013

Since 2007, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has held an annual International Conference on RFID, at which academics and members of the radio frequency identification industry collaborate to solve technical problems, innovate new solutions and probe into the details of how RFID works. For the past six of those seven annual gatherings, IEEE RFID has been collocated with the RFID Journal LIVE! conference and exhibition. Earlier this month, while most attendees at LIVE! 2013 were watching presentations by end users or chatting with RFID product vendors in the exhibit hall, a few were expanding their RFID knowledge at the neighboring IEEE RFID 2013 conference, in the Orange County Convention Center.

IEEE is the largest professional society in the world, with 435,000 members focused on every aspect of electrical energy and its use. Within the organization, there are nine separate societies that include RFID among their topics. In 2007, IEEE instituted an RFID Technical Committee on RFID, which then launched the co-located conference with RFID Journal LIVE!

Intermec’s Pavel Nikitin

“Co-locating gives us a balance of academia and industry,” says Matthew Reynolds, a faculty member at Duke University, the former CTO of ThingMagic and the chair of the IEEE RFID 2013 event. While 84 attendees at this year’s conference were strictly academic, 91 engineers and other industry members from the commercial side of RFID were in attendance as well. Members of the LIVE! conference who signed up for All-Access Passes could also attend programs at the IEEE conference.

The three-day IEEE RFID conference consists of three components: technical sessions and poster sessions, whereby researchers describe new development in RFID technology; tutorials, in which attendees can learn about the technical basics of RFID; and workshops, where academics and industry participants hold focused discussions regarding particular themes.

“I believe that attending the IEEE conference is the best way to see the cutting edge of what’s being developed in the RFID arena,” says Tim Waggoner, a cofounder of Open Wave RFID, an RFID and real-time location system (RTLS) solution provider based in Chattanooga. (Open Wave designs software for RFID-enabled applications for manufacturers, health-care facilities, laboratories and other companies.) For example, he says, during IEEE RFID 2009, he attended a session titled “Open-Source RFID Software,” led by representatives from the Auto-ID Labs at MIT, Fosstrak, Impinj and Pramari (now known as Transcends) that discussed open-source software tools—in particular, Fosstrak’s Tag Data Translation (TDT) engine and Low-Level Reader Protocol (LLRP) Commander module (see RFID News Roundup: Fosstrak Releases Open-Source LLRP Software).

“These tools… were invaluable when developing RFID-enabled software for our customers,” Waggoner says, explaining that “the Fosstrak TDT module allows a software developer an easy way to convert between different EPC tag representations. The Fosstrak LLRP Commander module allows us to manage LLRP-compliant RFID readers, and to view the actual XML messages that are being sent to and from the RFID reader.”

Open Wave RFID has utilized the Fosstrak LLRP Commander module as a design tool when developing software that communicates with LLRP-complaint readers. It allows Open Wave to monitor the LLRP commands being sent to and from the RFID readers. “This tool allows us to be more efficient when working through the software design life-cycles with our customers,” Waggoner explains.

According to Pavel Nikitin, Intermec Technologies‘ principal engineer, “Over the seven years of this conference existence, [Intermec has] published seven papers.” In 2010, Intermec received IEEE RFID’s Best Paper award, and in 2012, it was nominated for that award. The company’s winning paper, “Phase Based Spatial Identification of UHF RFID Tags,” provided an overview of the spatial identification (determining position and velocity) of modulated backscatter tags. Intermec’s 2012 paper, “Passive Tag-to-Tag Communication,” described how passive tags can talk to each other directly in the presence of external radio frequency fields. For this year’s award, IEEE RFID’s judges picked the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), for its work, titled “Wide-Coverage Array Antenna Using a Dual-Beam Switching for UHF RFID Applications.”

Duke University’s Matthew Reynolds

An example of collaboration that can benefit companies were the meetings that Nikitin had with engineers from Voyantic over the course of several IEEE RFID conferences, thereby helping Intermec to improve its tag-testing system that utilized National Instruments‘ hardware. Voyantic indicated that it, too, benefitted from this collaboration with its own test systems it was developing and now markets commercially to companies around the world. Intermec uses its tag-testing system to evaluate the performance of the tags and smart labels it manufactures, as well as to help it develop new tags.

The tutorials and workshops are intended to allow attendees to dive more deeply into specific technical areas of interest, the organization reports, and are led by a recognized expert in each area. This year, the tutorial focused on RFID systems operating at frequencies of 5.8 GHz and higher. One workshop explored ways to enhance the near-metal performance of RFID tags, while a second provided an overview of RFID tags and sensors for biomedical applications. Typically, attendees have engineering backgrounds and considerable experience in the topic at hand, but are seeking greater detail. “It can get extremely technical,” Reynolds says, though in some cases, individuals who are potential end users, or are from companies with a limited background in the technology, also attend.

For the technical sessions, the IEEE International Conference on RFID puts out a call in advance of each event for “original, high-impact research papers on RFID-related topics,” which are typically due in December. The papers are presented anonymously to a panel of three anonymous peer reviewers, who then select the best ones to be presented at the conference, based on originality, the importance of the problem being addressed, technical merit, clarity and the potential impact of the results. For this year’s conference, IEEE RFID received 89 paper submissions. In total, 36 were accepted (approximately 40 percent of the submissions received). Those papers’ authors presented their work during the conference’s technical sessions.

For this year’s poster and demonstration session, 17 posters were submitted by students and scientists, of which 15 submissions were accepted—an 88 percent acceptance ratio. Along the walls of one room at the convention center, participants tack up their posters, which summarize a particular project on which they are working. The participants then stand beside their respective posters and explain their projects. According to Reynolds, the poster session is designed to provide researchers with an opportunity to cover preliminary or exploratory work within RFID research.

In addition, student teams submitted their designs for a custom 915 MHz LED rectenna (a tag antenna, plus an RF charge pump and a light-emitting diode). A cash prize was awarded to those who developed the smallest device able to light up the LED at the farthest distance from a 915 MHz continuous wave source.

This year’s topic, for both paper and poster submitters, included categories similar to those of previous years: antennas and propagation; applications and software; circuits, devices and interrogators; localization, protocols and security; and sensors. In addition, Reynolds says, three new topics were added to the list: next-generation physical layers (PHY), power harvesting and RFID in biomedical.

Addressing those new topics, a paper focusing on next-generation PHY by researchers at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Technische Universität Dresden described active millimeter-wave backscatter tags in combination with high-capacity data storage and high-speed data transfer. Regarding the topic of power harvesting, a paper submitted by the Georgia Institute of Technology‘s Christopher Valenta and Gregory Durgin discussed power-optimized waveforms and how they can increase the power-conversion efficiency of energy-harvesting circuits. In the biomedical field, Brian Otis, provided a keynote speech that included a description of his latest research into a smart contact lens that could detect glucose levels in the tears of diabetic wearers.

Nikitin says he has seen the conference lead the way in areas of importance to the RFID market, such as localization and smart antennas.

“The mission of the conference is to bring people together,” Reynolds says—both academics and engineers—in order “to provide leadership” in the innovation of RFID solutions, and to work through technical problems that might not be solved purely by engineers in the industry, or purely by academics working in a laboratory setting. “This is a great opportunity for partnerships,” he states. “Attendees can go there with the seed of an idea and explore that.”

IEEE RFID is a volunteer organization. This year’s conference had 103 volunteers, consisting of paper reviewers, members of the conference organizing committee, tutorial and workshop presenters, and members of the IEEE Technical Committee on RFID. Next year, IEEE RFID will once again hold its event concurrently with RFID Journal LIVE!, on Apr. 8-10, in Orlando, Fla.