An Information Theoretic Analysis of Single Transceiver Passive RFID Networks

Abstract In this paper, we study single transceiver passive RFID networks by modeling the underlying physical system as a special cascade of a certain broadcast channel (BCC) and a multiple access channel (MAC), using a “nested codebook” structure in between. The particular application differentiates this communication setup from an ordinary cascade of a BCC and a MAC, and requires certain structures such as “nested codebooks”, impurity channels or additional power constraints. We investigate this problem both for discrete alphabets, where we characterize the achievable rate region, as well as for continuous alphabets with additive Gaussian noise, where we provide the capacity region. Hence, we establish the maximal achievable error free communication rates for this particular problem which constitutes the fundamental limit that is achievable by any TDMA based RFID protocol and the achievable rate region for any RFID protocol for the case of continuous alphabets under additive Gaussian noise.