Energy sprinklers for passive UWB RFID

In passive RFID networks the reading range is often limited by the intrinsic two-hop propagation mechanism. To counteract such effect, in this paper we introduce the idea of energy sprinklers for the recently proposed UWB-UHF RFID networks based on backscatter modulation. In particular, we show how low-complexity sprinklers acting as transmitters significantly improve the capability of reading and localizing tags thanks to the multistatic configuration. Moreover, by exploiting the UHF signaling, sprinklers behave like sources of energy that can be exploited by energy harvesters to activate the UWB backscatter modulators in the tag.