CAREER: Long-Range Near Field Communication for Ultra-Dense Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) can improve the quality of life by connecting everyday things and providing essential information for intelligent management of our daily life. However, the deployment of ultra-dense IoT devices is constrained by the spectrum scarcity. The Near Field Communication (NFC) using high-frequency (HF) band magnetic signals has a short communication range which generates negligible interference with existing wireless applications.

Also, NFC signals can efficiently penetrate through various materials and provide a reliable communication channel. Nowadays, NFC tags have been used in retail, medical, clothing industry, and agriculture among others. However, due to the limited communication range, these tags are usually scanned manually, which cannot support automatic IoT applications.

This project aims to develop a long-range NFC system that can read ultra-dense NFC tags autonomously using mobile robots. Localization and various sensing algorithms will be designed to fully leverage the potential of ubiquitous NFC tags to improve the quality of life and working efficiency. This project also supports education by integrating research activities with existing undergraduate and graduate curricula at Norfolk State University, which is one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and sharing research outcomes and outreach materials with other Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) in the Inclusive Engineering Consortium.

The following four research directions will be pursued to achieve the objective of developing a framework for ultra-dense IoT with networking, sensing, and localization capabilities. First, this project will design long-range NFC readers using coil arrays, self-interference cancellation, and magnetic blind beamforming to extend the communication range of existing NFC systems.

The existence of high-permittivity and high-conductivity materials that are close to the reader or tags will be considered, and their impacts on wireless communication performance will be studied. Second, anti-collision protocols for strongly coupled tags will be designed. The Orientation Division Multiple Access will be developed and analyzed to allow multiple NFC tags to access the wireless channel and reduce the misreading ratio.

Third, tag orientation sensing and localization algorithms will be developed under the constraints of tag coupling and random orientation. Last, the security and privacy issues created by the long communication range will also be considered and addressed by developing near field secure transmission strategies. Reconfigurable testbeds will be developed to verify the proposed approaches.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.