Design And Implementation Of RFID Reader Based On Virtual Radio Technology

Recently, with the emergence of multi-core CPU and Applications, the computing capacity and performance of a personal computer has increased greatly, which can be comparable with traditional dedicated digital signal processor in some way, so it is a possible to design a common software of the radio platform on the computer. In the current domestic and foreign markets, most of the RFID readers are designed based on software-radio technology, which not only require specialized hardware platforms such as ASIC, DSP, FPGA or ARM to handle baseband signal processing, but also have some disadvantages of high technical requirements, poor portability, long development cycles, high costs and difficult to support multiple protocols and multiple applications. The virtual radio technology using common computer architecture joins with the software components as much as possible, which is based on a multi-core PC software radio platform, able to achieve a variety of communication protocols in a computer, and has the advantages of ease of development and software upgrades.This paper firstly introduced a software radio technology and its history and characteristics, thus virtual radio technology application in this article. Secondly, a conception based virtual radio technology RFID reader was presented, taking the ISO/IEC18000-6C protocol as a standard. Finally, the feasibility of the conception was verified.For system algorithm setting, firstly, the ISO/IEC18000-6C protocol was introduced in detail, and research and analysis was proceeded in tag identification layer, physical layer and the physical link parameters, the algorithm definition. Secondly, some system parameters were analyzed such as the maximum time-consuming, synchronous time-consuming, the free space propagation loss and multipath fading of the reader, and the key algorithm of link that is baseband signal processing algorithms was designed. Finally, the system function and link simulation were verified on the self-built platform in MATLAB, and the parameter settings of best performance of the system link were found.In the realization of the system, this paper built a hardware test platform based on the virtual radio system. Firstly, the system functions and working mechanism, such as the main modules DMA control, the FPGA logic control and RF front-end were designed and analyzed in detail, describing the method of PC system processing and the design process of PCIe drive program, completing key algorithm of processing the tag identification layer and baseband signal. Secondly, send and receive path were validated, and the center frequency of this test was set as902MHz for the RF parameter configuration, the receiving and sending base-band signal were compared, in order to verify the performance of the hardware system on the platform. Finally, while the performance of the hardware system was guaranteed, the system protocol conformance was testified, completing from the signal generation, measurement, analysis to the real-time feedback of the functional test. When the protocol conformance test was completed, the label of identity was finished. So the feasibility of the system was verified.