RF-Prism: Versatile RFID-based Sensing through Phase Disentangling

Abstract

The signal phase is one of the most important metrics in RFID-based sensing, which is a useful technique enabling many significant applications. However, existing approaches of RFID-based sensing are often restricted in terms of the sensing capability or accuracy, due to the phase entanglement problem: the phase of the RFID signal is jointly affected by multiple factors, and the change in the signal phase cannot be directly attributed to anyone of them. In order to tackle this problem, we propose RF-Prism, a versatile sensing approach that can simultaneously infer multiple physical factors (i.e., location, orientation, and material of targets), purely based on the phase readings. RF-Prism includes a comprehensive model to describe how different physical factors affect the phase of the received signal, and a complete design to disentangle the phase in the multi-frequency and multi-antenna scenario. We implement RF-Prism and evaluate its performance with extensive experiments. The results show that RF-Prism simultaneously achieves a mean localization error of 7.61 cm, a mean orientation error of 9.83 degrees, and 87.9% material identification accuracy, which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.