Phase Detection and Modulation Improvement for Active Load Modulation during Continuous Transmission

Abstract

The paper covers one of the communication technologies used in wireless sensor networks. We have presented improvements in existing radio frequency identification (RFID) systems to address the problem of the phase selection in active load modulation (ALM). The phase selection affects the interoperability of communication devices and has to be addressed in the design phase of a new tag. A novel transmission method is presented to make the phase selection irrelevant for device interoperability. A second solution is shown to improve the existing system synchronization, which allows operation with arbitrary selected phase. A mathematical analysis of signals present on the antenna was used together with the reference reader model to perform an analysis of proposed improvements. We proved that the proposed transmission method is less affected by phase selection. Furthermore, we demonstrated that existing system improvement allows synchronization and operation at an arbitrarily selected phase despite the continuous transmission and large signal-to-interference ratio.

Keywords

• wireless sensor networks
• radio frequency identification
• near field communication
• active load modulation
• binary phase shift keying
• interference measurement