RFID Harmonic for Vibration Sensing

Conventional vibration sensing systems, equipped with specific sensors (e.g., accelerometer) and communication modules, are either expensive or cumbersome to deploy. Recently research community revisits this classic topic by taking advantage of off-the-shelf RFIDs. However, limited by low reading rate and long wavelength, current RFID based solutions can only sense low-frequency (e.g., below 100 Hz) mechanical vibrations with larger amplitude (e.g., >5 mm). To address the issue, this work presents TagSound, an RFID-based vibration sensing system that explores a tag's harmonic backscattering to recover high-frequency and tiny mechanical vibrations accurately. The key innovations are in two aspects: harmonics based sensing and a new recovery scheme. We implement TagSound with USRP platforms. Our comprehensive evaluation shows (i) TagSound can achieve a mean error of 0.37 Hz when detecting vibrations at frequencies below 100 Hz, and a mean error of 4.2 Hz even when the vibration frequency is up to 2500 Hz. (ii) TagSound can achieve a Hz-level frequency estimation even when the vibration amplitude is only 2 mm.

Automated summary

This study presents a TagSound system for RFID-based vibration sensing, which can accurately recover high-frequency and tiny mechanical vibrations. The key innovations lie in harmonics-based sensing and a new recovery scheme, achieving high frequency estimation accuracy in experiments.