Douglas Lautner, Xiayu Hua, Scott DeBates and Shangping Ren, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA

As a core component of the Internet of Things technology (IoT), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagged items will add billions, perhaps trillions, of objects to the Internet. As a result, uses of Ultra High Frequency (UHF) RFID sensing become massive ranging from logistics, retail and healthcare to homes and even entire smart cities. Under this trend, mobile UHF RFID scanners also need to evolve. Consumers will interact with their surroundings via tagged RFID items taking full advantage of the advancing IoT. For mainstream consumer smartphones, unfortunately, UHF RFID connectivity has yet to be fully integrated. The major challenges are: 1) the compatibility of an RFID reader module to the host platform, 2) Radio Frequency (RF) signal coexistence interference between the RFID reader and other sensor/RF technologies, and 3) the unacceptable high current drain caused by RFID active scanning. In this paper, we present a design and implementation of a novel modular UHF RFID scanning subsystem, the UHF RFID reader module, on a Motorola Moto-Z smartphone. This module is fully integrated with an Android 7.0 Operating System (OS) and directly interconnects with the low-level smartphone hardware and software framework. With the new antenna design and the signal spectrum analysis, we guarantee the RF isolation of the Mod with the smartphone’s other native wireless components and sensors. Our design and implementation also address the current drain issue and extends the battery life of Moto-Z smartphone up to 30.4 hours with IoT RFID scanning.

UHF RFID, Smartphone design, mobile system architecture, mobile sensing