Reliability Improvement of RF Identification of Shadowed People in Building Corridors Using Space Diversity

Anotace: This paper deals with the investigation of space diversity techniques for elimination of signal fading and consequently extension of coverage area in applications of RF identification of shadowed people in a building corridor. Several measurement scenarios were evaluated. They comprised up to four wearable tags placed at different positions on a human body with one or two reader antennas, including shadowing by a small crowd of people. It was shown that the achieved corresponding SIMO mode diversity gain accounted for ca. 1 dB at the overall improvement in the trace coverage amounted to ca. 5%. On the other hand, the MIMO mode diversity configuration brought an improvement of up to 10% and enabled to cover more than 50% of the identification area, including the scenario where shadowing by a small crowd of people was present.