Tri-Band Fractal Antennas for RFID Applications

The RFID is a rapidly developing technology. It’s used in many applications such as logistics, ticketing, security, employee attendance record and others. Also, fractal technology is used in many areas, and recently in antenna design because it allows making multi-band and wide-band antennas. In this paper, two tri-band fractal antennas are studied for the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications using the Method of Moment (MoM). The first one is designed for the RFID readers and it operates at 3.85 GHZ, 5.80 GHZ and 8.12 GHZ. The second one is designed for the RFID Tags and it operates at 3.94 GHZ, 5.65 GHZ and 8.20 GHZ.


Introduction
RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, a term that describes any system of identification wherein an electronic device that uses radio frequency or magnetic field variations to communicate is attached to an item.The two most talked-about components of an RFID system are the tag, which is the identification device attached to the item we want to track, and the reader, which is a device that can recognize the presence of RFID tags and read the information stored on them.The reader can then inform another system about the presence of the tagged items.The system with which the reader communicates usually runs software that stands between readers and applications.This software is called RFID middleware [1].
In a typical RFID system [2], passive tags are attached to an object such as goods, vehicles, humans, animals, and shipments, while a vertical/circular polarization antenna is connected to the RFID reader.The RFID reader and tag can radio-communicate with each other using a number of different frequencies, and currently most RFID systems use unlicensed spectrum.The common frequencies used are low frequency (125 KHz), high frequency (13.56 MHz), ultra high frequency (860 -960 MHz/2.45GHz), and microwave frequency (3.6/3.9/5.8/5.9/8.2GHZ [3]).The typical RFID readers are able to read (or detect) the tags of only a single frequency but multimode readers are becoming cheaper and popular which are capable of reading the tags of different frequencies [4].
Several calculation methods are adopted to solve the Maxwell equations and then study the performance of the antennas.Among these, two are widely used in simulation software: 1) The method of moments (MoM) is used among others in FEKO software (an abbreviation derived from the German phrase FEldberechnung bei Körpern mit beliebiger Oberfläche (Field computations involving bodies of arbitrary shape)) [5].
2) The method of finite integral (FIT) is used in the software CST Microwave Studio (Computer Simulation Technology Microwave Studio) [6].
In this work, we use the FEKO software.

Fractal Antennas
The fractal antennas use fractals and self-similar models.
Several studies show that we can easily make compact, multi-band and wide-band antennas, suitable for miniaturization and various applications such as RFID, WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network), WIMAX (WorldWide Interoperability for Microwave Access), WIFI (WIreless FIdelity) [7][8][9].

Readers Antennas
The reader antenna is a fractal antenna 2 nd iteration (Figure 1).
The antenna is fed by a Coplanar Waveguide (CPW).The antenna, the feeding point and the ground plane are on the same plane (Figure 2).Several studies have used this mode of feeding [10][11][12][13].
The antenna is designed on an FR4 substrate (relative dielectric constant = 4.

Tag Antenna
The Tag antenna is a fractal antenna 3 rd iteration (Figure 4).
The antenna is fed by a Coplanar Waveguide (CPW).The antenna, the feeding point and the ground plane are on the same plane (Figure 5).

Reader Antenna
The analysis of the S 11 parameter (Figure 7) shows that the Reader antenna operates at f 1 = 3.85 GHZ, f 2 = 5.8 GHZ and f 3 = 8.12 GHZ.We also note that the gain of this antenna is 2.6 dBi for  = 90˚ and  = 60˚ as shown by Figure 9.

GHZ to 8.278 GHZ).
We also note that the gain of this antenna is 2.7 dBi for  = 30˚ and  = 90˚ as shown by Figure 13.

Tag Antenna
The analysis of the S 11 parameter (Figure 14) shows that the Tag antenna operates at f 1 = 3.94 GHZ, f 2 = 5.65  We also note that the gain of this antenna is 3.

Read Range of the Antennas
To calculate the read range of these antennas, we apply the First Transmission Equation (EQ1) which gives the relationship between the received power (Pr) as a func- tion of the transmitted power (Pt), the antennas gain (Gt, Gr) and free space loss which can be expressed in terms of the wavelength () and the distance between the antennas(R) .
For each one of the antennas, the read range calculation is done by taking a reference antenna of gain 3 dBi and minimum detectable power of 1 mW.The transmitting power is 4 W [3]. Therefore, we can build the table below (Table 1).

Comparison with other Methods of Calculation
This study has been done with The CST Microwave Studio which is based on the finite integral method (FIT) [3].Our results are similar, but with small differences summarized in the Table 2.
Comparing these results, we note that:  For the Reader, there is a small frequency lag of 0.25 GHZ (f 1 FIT = 3.6 GHZ and f 1 MoM = 3.85 GHZ)  For the Tag, there is a small frequency lag of 0.25 GHZ (f 2 FIT = 5.9 GHZ and f 1 MoM = 5.65 GHZ)

Conclusions
The fractal antennas are preferred due to small size, light weight and multiband.This paper introduced RFID reader and tag antennas.The reader antenna exhibits a −10 dB bandwidth of 305 MHz at 3.85 GHz, 201 MHz at 5.8 By simulating the antennas using the Method of Moment (MoM) and comparing the results with another study using the method of finite integral (FIT), we find that the results are similar, even if there are small lags that are tolerable.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The first 4 iterations of the Tree-Fractal antenna.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4.The first 4 iterations of the Rectangular-Fractal antenna.

F 1 =
3.85 GHZAround this frequency, the S 11 parameter shown by Figure8, we note that the bandwidth is 305 MHZ (from 3.69 GHz to 4 GHZ).

Figure 7 .
Figure 7. Simulated S 11 versus frequency graph of the Reader antenna.

Figure 14 .
Figure 14.Simulated S 11 versus frequency graph of the Tag antenna.
Figure 19.Evolution of S 11 around the frequency f 3 = 8.2 GHZ.

Table 2 . Comparison of results between the two methods MoM and FIT.
GHz, and 289 MHz at 8.12 GHz.The tag antenna exhibits a −10 dB bandwidth of 165 MHz at 3.94 GHz, 149 MHz at 5.65 GHz, and 166 MHz at 8.2 GHz.The maximum read range obtained by the reader antenna is 74.72 cm, and 83.83 cm by the tag antenna.