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Energy Efficient 5G Networks Connectivity, Capacity Enhancement and

Accessibility for Robust RFID Networks: Survey

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 2017 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Electro-Technology for National Development (NIGERCON)

Energy Efficient 5G Networks Connectivity, Capacity Enhancement

and Accessibility for Robust RFID Networks: Survey
Sylvester Ajah
Computer Engineering Department, Akanu Ibiam Federal Polytechnic, Unwana, Ebonyi State, Nigeria
ajah.sylvester@gmail.com

Abstract – Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an Auto –
ID technologies that uniquely identify items using radio waves.
RFID technologies enable the identification of products from a
distance without line of sight, which enhances the speed of
handling the manufactured goods and materials. This
characteristics differs it from barcode technology which can
read line of sight bar from 18 inches maximum when moving
beam readers are used or in contact form when light pens
readers are used respectively. Currently, the frequencies for
RFID connections are in the following ranges: 125 – 134.2 KHz,
13.56 MHz, 856 – 960 MHz and 2.45 GHz. These various
frequency ranges for RFID communications entails that any
company manufacturing RFID product using a particular
frequency range will not be able to communicate with another
with a particular frequency range, will not be able to
communicate with another using another frequency range,
thereby hindering interoperability across various tags and
reader from different companies manufactured RFID tags and
readers using specific frequency(s). Hence, the 5G paradigm
which is a unified network for RFID communication will be idea
for enabling robust and reliable RFID communications across
all the frequencies.
Keywords: 5G, Energy Efficiency, Fifth Generation Network,
RFID, Radio Frequency Identification
I Introduction
The RFID is applied majorly in retail stock management,
packing access control, supply – chain tracking, marathon
races, parking access control, library books tracking, airline
luggage tracking, electronic security keys, theft prevention,
toll collection and healthcare (1). Many companies wish to
keep track of their personnel, sources and working machines
for various reasons. The reasons can be for security,
coordination or performance purposes. The aim and
requirements are the main factors that determine the shape of
tracking; one developed for one purpose may not be suitable
for another depending on their technological requirements.
The real-time tracking can be determined with high precision
in open areas with the global positioning system (GPS) (2).
RFID systems are increasingly common in the applications
that are shared between public and private sectors. These
systems facilitate the aforementioned applications in [1]. But,
despite their increasing ubiquity, the management of public –
private RFID systems is under – researched and little
understood, hence the need research more to bridge the gap
(3). RFID is a promising technology for many corporations
that seek to improve their processes, increase productivity
and achieve a competitive advantage. But RFID cannot
provide the fullest gains as a standalone technology. Hence,
corporations are looking to integrate RFID solutions with the
existing infrastructure, like incorporating RFID into their
mobile enterprise. Also, different bodies specify different
frequency ranges for RFID communication across the globe,
thereby causing incompatibility challenge between tags and
readers from different vendors (4). Also , (5) observed that
the adoption of RFID technology have not be as fast as
predicted by the experts, which is caused majorly by the lack
of a universal standard for RFID communications.
The evolutions in wireless mobile communications started
with first generation cellular wireless systems (1G), which
came on board in 1980 operating in analogue mode using
frequency division multiple access technique (FDMA) for
radio transmission. The limitations associated with this mode
in terms of poor transmission quality, low coverage, security,
poor associated services and poor spectral efficiency
necessitate the need for digitization of cellular system, hence
the bourn of second generation cellular system (2G) – global
systems for mobile communications (GSM) (5). GSM
operates on circuit switch technique and has a throughput of
9.6 kbps, which when it evolved into GPRS which is
considered 2.5G that operates in packet switch technique, the
throughput went up to 300kps and bandwidth up to 200kHz.
The GPRS enhances the efficient use of scarce radio / time
resources among larger number of users but suffers from
severe latency, hence causing packets loss and corruption.
This challenge catalyse the evolution of enhanced data rates
for GSM evolution (EDGE – 2.75G) was developed to pave
way for Third – Generation Systems and also enhance the
throughput to 470 kbps.
Third generation (3G) mobile communication started with the
proposal from the most Important International
Telecommunication – 2000 (IMT – 2000) for the use of

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UMTS (W-CDMA – wideband code division multiple access)
as the successor to GSM. The UMTS differs from 2.5G and
2.75G mostly in the former principles for air interface
transmission, (W-CDMA instead of FDMA / TDMA). The
air interface access for the user Equipment (UE) is provided
by the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN)
(5) (6). The 3G system offers a throughput of up to 2 mbps,
over 5 MHz channel carrier width which is dependent on
mobility and high spectrum efficiency. The release 5 of
UMTS which is called High Speed Data Packet Access
(HSDPA) which is considered as 3.5G offered a peak
throughput of 14.4 mbps with 2x2 antennas in 5 MHz channel
bandwidth at the downlink. The evolution of multiple array
antennas (multiple input multiple output – MIMO antennas)
could lead to a throughput of 42 Mbps in HSDPA (5). For 3G
uplink, the UMTS release 6 standard by 3GPP called high –
Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) with uplink
throughput of 5.76 mbps (5). After the HSDPA roadmap
leads to high – speed OFDMA Packet Access (HSOPA), the
project that is called the long term evolution (LTE) initiative
which is considered as 3.75G and achieve a throughput of up
to 200 mbps for downlink and 100 mbps for uplink using
OFDMA modulation. HSOPA differs from HSDPA and
HSOPA with the entire air interface system (OFDMA) which
is unrelated and incompatible with W-CDMA. It also has
flexible bandwidth of 1.25 – 20 MHz, high spectral efficiency
and low latency compared with the former releases.
The 3G transitional cellular and wireless systems toward 4G
comprise mainly LTE (3GPP family) and WiMAX (IEEE
family, 802.16e) (5). The first release of LTE was labelled as
3.9G. The aim being to provide high throughput, low-latency
and radio optimized radio access technology that supports
flexible bandwidth deployment (7). The LTE supports
downlink peak throughput of 326 mbps with 4 X4 MIMO
within 20 MHz bandwidth (5). Further evolutions in LTE
Fig 1: Wireless technologies evolution (10).
207
results to LTE -Advance which is called fourth generation
mobile standard (4G). The features of 4G include peak
downlink throughput of 1Gbps and uplink of 0.5Gbps,
transmission bandwidth of 70MHz for downlink and 40MHz
for uplink, average user throughput of 3 times higher than in
LTE etc. Since the advent of 4G, there have being many
further releases after LTE – Advance with each release with
enhance capabilities, hence it being used for many smart
connections like smart homes and other smart city
applications.
Despite the improvements in the LTE – Advance system,
there is still new for new generation network standard that
will take care of different challenges associated with wireless
mobile communication today. This is the objective behind
fifth generation network standard 5G. The feature of the
expected 5G network system include: low battery
consumption, ubiquity and high throughput at cell edge,
multiple simultaneous data transfer paths, 1Gbps throughput
in mobility, more secure: better cognitive radio / SDR
security, higher level spectral efficiency, WWWW – wireless
– base web applications that include full multimedia
capability beyond 4G speeds, more applications combined
artificial intelligence, not harmful to health and cheaper
traffic fees due to low infrastructure deployment costs. The
5G system will be a new technology that will provide all the
possible applications, by using only one universal device, and
interconnecting most of the already existing communication
infrastructures (5). The three main feature of 5G networks
are: to support huge capacity and connectivity; to carry
different set of services, applications and users with
extremely divergent requirements; and to make flexible and
efficient use of the available spectrum whether on continuous
bases or not, supporting wildly different network deployment
scenarios (8) (9).
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II Related Works
One important point towards interoperability is to enable
things talk same language to be able to interact with each
other, and this can be achieved by enabling IPV6 on the
RFID tags and readers. But the challenge of communicating
using IPV6 for RFID tags is that they are equipped with
limited resources that will inhibit their computational
capability (11). This is an important observation going by the
limited processing ability of RFID tags but 5G network is not
only enabled using IPV6, hence the use of 5G network to
enable RFID communications can remove the obstacle
observed by the author.
The major limitation of RFID technology is its requirement
for specialized single-purpose readers and its mobility to very
limited range that is powered by Wi-Fi networks. While
general Wi-Fi networks have become increasingly common,
RFID has being limited for the most part to one-off
applications (12). Hence the need to have ubiquitous and
reliable network that will power robust RFID connectivity.
To correct this, Hai, L. et al advocated for the integration of
Fig 2: Smart phone enabled RFID network (4).
Authors in (13) advocated for the adoption of Femtocell
networks that will be provided by cellular network providers
to enhance the system capacity with dual benefits of higher –
quality links and more spatial reuse. The argument for the
above proposal is that wireless users spent 80% of their time
indoor and 20% outside. The Femtocell proposed will be akin
to WiFi, but the merit of Femtocell over WiFi is that
interoperability between indoor networks and cellular
networks are enhanced. This is a wonderful concept that will
aid decongest the outdoor network capacity that can used for
long range RFID based services.
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RFID readers with the sensor nodes in wireless sensor
network (WSN) and wireless devices to enhance the ubiquity
of the network (1). This is a good idea but RFID will still be
limited to a short range hence the need for wide area network
that is being championed by 5G network.
To overcome the aforementioned short range challenge, (4)
advocated for the integration of RFID with wireless smart-
phone. This is to be done via integration of smart-phone with
RFID tags and others with RFID reader. Smart phones with
RFID tags can connect to GSM or other wireless phone
network and have embedded RFID chips with some
identification information programmed on it. When they are
in close range with the ones with reader, they can
communicate by tags sending their information to the reader
and the reader sending back some information to the tags.
While the smart-phones with readers collect data from all the
tags and send the information to the database using wireless
phone network as shown in figure 2. Sequel to prevalence of
smart phones, this will surely enhance the ubiquity of RFID
networks but lack of unified RFID standard will inhibit its
implementation.
The three key pillars that will make the future network (5G) a
reality are: pressing more radio spectrum into service in
order to meet the increased capacity and coverage demand;
using many more base stations deployed in a heterogeneous
network, combining macro sites with smaller base stations
and using a range of radio technologies that include LTE-A,
Wi-Fi and any future 5G technologies, integrated flexibly in
any combination; and raising the overall performance of
networks (13). In addition, the logistics and fright tracking
are important use cases for mobile communications that
enable the tracking of inventory and packages wherever they
are through using RFID and location based information
systems. The RFID used cases for 5G network require lower
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data rates but need wide coverage and reliable location
information (14).
The concept of moving towards 5G network is based on the
communications need trend, the assumption is that 5G
network will address the six challenges with 4G network.
These challenges are; higher capacity, higher throughput, low
end – to – end latency, cost, massive device connectivity and
steady quality of service and experience (15).
III 5G Powered RFID Network
5G, the mobile communication technology for beyond 2020,
will provide access to information and the sharing of data
anywhere and anytime for anyone and anything. Hence, the
future wireless access will not only be about the connectivity
for people but for anything that benefits from being
connected (15). The authors of [15] summarized what is
obtainable with 5G network, RFID included. To this end, it is
Fig 3: General Overview of 5G Networks (19).
Another way of enabling pervasive RFID communication is
device – to – device (D2D) communications. This is the
communication paradigm that allows communications
between devices, without the participation of base stations. It
has the following merits: improving the reliability of the link
between the devices, enhance spectral efficiency and system
capacity with reduced latency within networks. Close device
209
a necessity to ensure that RFID communication is powered
via 5G network. Also, the author (18) observed that since the
5G cellular architecture is heterogeneous, it is a necessity for
it to include macrocells, microcells, small cells and relays.
While (19) stated that a mobile small cell concept is an
integral part of 5G wireless cellular network and is consist of
mobile relays and small cell concepts.
5G communication paradigm includes various enhanced
technologies like Beam Division Multiple Access (BDMA)
and Non – and quasi – orthogonal or Filter Bank Multi carrier
(FBMC) multiple access. This communication paradigm
results from the aggregation of numerous technologies like
massive MIMO, mmWave communication, Cognitive Radio
Networks (CRNs), Visible Light Communication (VLC). The
earlier cellular communication architecture (1G – 4G) is base
station (BS) dependent. Hence, they are called network
centric, while 5G is heading toward device – centric approach
(21).
can communicate directly with each other by establishing
direct links. Consequent to close proximity of devices, it
enhances the energy efficiency of the network compared to
the conventional cellular networks (21) (22). D2D is to be
enabled in 5G networks and is still currently being developed
in for standardization. It will be wise enable RFID
communications using this communication paradigm.
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Fig 4: Device – to – Device General Scenarios
IV Conclusion
The advent of 5G communication paradigm has provided
amble opportunity for the development of RFID network to
fulfil its full potentials. From the survey, it is obvious that
enabling RFID communications in 5G networks will enable
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