Martí Boada - Battery-less NFC Sensors for the Internet of Things

Mart Boada
Antonio Lazaro
David Girbau
Ramn Villarino

First published 2022 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

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ISTE Ltd 2022

The rights of Mart Boada, Antonio Lazaro, David Girbau and Ramn Villarino to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022939222

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78630-836-8

Streamline industrial processes have always been a priority to reduce time and, therefore, to reduce costs. The identification of goods is an important factor to consider in almost any process since it is necessary to track and get specific information about them, hence the importance of automation. The most common method is to use barcode systems on a printed label with an identification number, which is read by an optical device connected to a computer (Palmer 2007) (see )

Barcodes have been included in several places of work such as libraries (Singh and Sharma 2015). They have medical uses, like in identifying blood transfusions (Murphy and Kay 2004) or in the administration of medication (Macias et al. 2018), proving that it is an easy, fast and accurate automatic collection method. Linear barcodes are the most common technology related to automatic identification data capture (AIDC). Usually, the reading methods use both hardware and software implementations. However, there are fully implemented methods with hardware (De Maeyer et al. 2003) and software (Muniz et al. 1999) solutions. Nonetheless, barcodes only contain information in one dimension (1D), containing therefore a limited amount of information. To enlarge the data representation capability, two-dimensional (2D) codes have been developed. Within the collection of 2D barcode symbologies (e.g. MaxiCode, PDF 417, codablock F, Aztec), two of them are the most widespread. The first choice is the data matrix, standardized by the ISO/IEC 16022 (ISO/IEC 2000a), and the second one is the quick response (QR) codes, standardized by the ISO/IEC 18004/2000 (ISO/IEC 2000b). Data matrix capacity is 2,334 alphanumeric characters, or 1,556 ASCII characters, and it uses between 30% and 60% less space than a QR code (Semacode 2006) (see ). However, it does not allow us to encode Japanese characters, which is the main reason why QR codes have been more extended worldwide.

encoded as (a) a QR code and (b) a data matrix

The implementation of 2D barcodes in the industry brings advantages to some, such as increased data capacity or the replacement of special-purpose laser scanners with digital cameras, which comes with a cost reduction and improves image processing by using dedicated software and algorithms (Ohbuchi et al. 2004; Falas and Kashani 2007; Liao and Lee 2010). Nowadays, smartphones are the prevailing devices with a built-in digital camera. Furthermore, the computational capability of the smartphone allows the installation of applications that read all kinds of barcode symbologies. Since QR codes are supposed to be widely used by any type of smartphone simply by taking a photo of the code, light conditions and possible damages or other alterations on the printed code must be considered (Liu et al. 2008) as well as security issues (Kieseberg et al. 2010).

Within AIDC systems, radio-frequency identification (RFID) (Finkenzeller 2010) arrived to overcome barcode limitations. An RFID system consists of two differentiated parts: a reader (also called an interrogator) and a tag (also known as a transponder). The reader generates a signal which is received by the tag. This signal is modulated at the tag embedding its internal information (e.g. an ID), and then it is sent back to the reader to be interpreted. lists some of the differences between barcodes and RFID.

Comparison of barcode and RFID

The spread of RFID technology at large scale began during the first years of the 21st century, when three major organizations (Walmart, Tesco and the US Department of Defense) opted to use this technology, streamlining the tracking of stock, sales and orders (Want 2006). The expansion of RFID came along due to the need to analyze and adapt its use for commercial applications and the need for regulations (Kelly and Erickson 2005) as well as for integrating methods for security and privacy (Juels 2006). RFID have been widely used for all kinds of applications (Weinstein 2005) such as object localization (Hahnel et al. 2004; Ni et al. 2014), car parking (Pala and Inan 2007), food traceability (Abad et al. 2009), logistics services (Chow et al. 2006) and navigation assistance for blind people (Chumkamon et al. 2008). The interrogators used to read the tags can be connected to the Internet, and are thus able to send the collected data of the identified objects to the cloud in real time, which leads to the so-called Internet of things (IoT) (Jia et al. 2012).

Passive RFID systems reduce the price of the tags to a few cents as well as to expand lifetime due to the lack of batteries. However, there is still an important drawback: the price of readers, besides the fact that each reader works in a specific frequency; thus, they are only useful for certain systems. Nevertheless, today, there is a subset of protocols within RFID technology, which is growing fast, known as near-field communication (NFC), which is embedded in most smartphones sold today due to its worldwide implementation as a payment mechanism (Pal et al. 2015; Ramos-de-Luna et al. 2015). Having NFC-enabled smartphones brings new opportunities to the usage of RFID applications, since the reader is now in the pocket of millions of end-users and almost always has an Internet connection. This makes NFC technology a suitable option in the IoT paradigm to be used as a bridge between