RFID Sensors and Antennas for Smart Agriculture and Intelligent Food Packaging

Abstract

With the advancement of emerging Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) techniques for object identification and sensing, the traditional packaging of food items is now moving toward intelligent food packaging. Traditional food packaging is only used for the protection of food products. Further, the barcode can provide pre-registered details about the package but fails to monitor the real-time freshness and quality of an edible product. On the other hand, the smart packaging using the RFID technique is capable to uniquely identify the package, monitor the quality of food material and its packaged environment in non-line-of-sight wireless mode. Thus, intelligent food packaging requires an RFID sensor tag that simultaneously monitors the changes in humidity, moisture, temperature, and pH level of a packaged food product. The chipless passive tag greatly reduces the cost, paper-based biodegradable packaging material reduces the packaging waste, and the concept of multi-tag polarization-insensitive resonators reduces the multi-path interference. Thus the integration of the above-mentioned solution would resolve the existing challenges of intelligent packaging of edible products. Along with the sensor tags, compatible high gain broadband antennas required for RFID reader increase the efficacy of overall system. This concept is equally efficient for smart agriculture. The sensor tag can detect some of the health parameters of plants, soil moisture level, and environment temperature etc. The antenna integrated with reader on fixed station or UAV can capture sensing data and send the information wirelessly to control station for post processing. The proposed work is beneficial for Intelligent Food Packaging and Smart Agriculture.