A New Solution for Car Parking RFID Reader

Mahdi abdelkarim, Seif Naoui, Chaker essid and Ali Gharsallah

Laboratory for Reasearch on Microwave Electronics, Physics Department,
Faculty of Science, University of ElManar, Tunis, Tunisia
Mahdi.abdelkarim@gmail.com

Abstract— In this paper, we present the design of a small antenna The car parking system requires the field within the limited
with bidirectional radiation pattern and high gain for RFID volume to be as strong as possible to avoid failed detections.
reader application. This antenna, which has a very simple To meet the high-gain demand of the RFID reader, the meta-
structure, is composed of three pairs of S-shaped meander line. materials technique [14]-[19], artificial magnetic conductor
The antenna is designed, fabricated and measured to operate at
the SHF band (2.4-2.485 GHz). The tested results are in good
(AMC) [20], dual ports technique [21], and EBG/PBG
agreement with those of the simulations. The proposed antenna arrangement insertion [22] [23] have been proposed. Thus,
has the advantage of high gain of 7db in both directions with a these designs, which are characterized by a unidirectional
volume equal to 106 mm × 19 mm × 0.9 mm, which makes it easy radiation pattern thanks to the elements loaded in the
to integrate in RFID readers and a good candidate for RFID environment of the antenna, may lead to a higher
smart parking applications. manufacturing cost. So, realizing a reader antenna with high
gain and small size is not an easy task.
Keywords—RFID reader antenna; S-Shaped antenna; SHF The new solution proposed in this work is to replace the two
RFID Applications; Smart parking application readers by just one reader with a bidirectional radiation pattern
antenna for vehicle identification in both directions, as can be
seen in Fig. 2. This method would reduce the cost of the
I. INTRODUCTION infrastructure necessary to implement the required microwave
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is based on an RFID systems.
electromagnetic field which is transmitted from the reader and Research papers on the bidirectional antenna are rare, although
received by the antenna from one or more tags located in its there have been some partial efforts [24].
reading field. The electromagnetic field is considered to be an In this work, the main objective is to design a novel reader
activation energy support for these tags. Once the tags are antenna, considering the S-Shaped meander line technique.
activated by the reader, they send back a signal, and therefore, This technique presents not only a small size, but also high
a dialogue is established between the two entities according to gain in both directions.
a predefined communication protocol and data can be
exchanged [1]-[5].
Car parking system is one of many applications which benefit
from RFID technology. This system enables vehicles to check-
in and check-out without having to stop and with secure, fast,
and convenient conditions. The system works thanks to an
RFID chip located on the vehicle and two readers placed at the
entrance of the car parking for vehicle access control in both
directions (as indicated in Fig.1) or for bi-directional vehicle
access control with unique barrier.
The small area allowed by the antenna imposes a constraint on
the design of the reader. Indeed, the demand for improving the Figure.1 Car Parking RFID System
performance and miniaturization of antennas has risen
considerably. On the other hand, the reader antenna in an
RFID system is often randomly oriented. For this purpose,
some designs have been described in literature to obtain
antennas with omnidirectional radiation patterns for each
reader.
The meander line [6]-[10] or dipole antenna [11]-[13] is
popularly used thanks to its several characteristics, such as
low profile, small dimension, light weight and fabrication
simplicity. But, the short reading distance of the antenna limits
the scope of its applications because it causes low Figure.2 Proposed Solution for Car Parking RFID reader
performance in terms of gain, directivity, and low efficiency.

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 II. ANTENNA DESIGN
Fig. 3 shows a prototype of the proposed S-shaped antenna. It
is comprised of three pairs of S-Shaped meander line printed
on both sides of the substrate to obtain a bidirectional
radiation pattern with high gain. The optimized design
parameters of the antenna are shown in Table I.
An Arlon CuClad 250LX substrate is used for this antenna.
This substrate has a thickness of 0.49 mm, a permittivity equal
to 2.42, and a loss tangent equal to 0.0018. The overall size of
the antenna is 106× 19 ×0.49 mm3. The upper and lower pairs
of the S-Shaped meander line are directly interconnected to
each other with a 50-Ohm SMA connector and are strongly
coupled to each other. The S-Shaped antenna has attractive
benefits, such as ease of fabrication, as can be seen in Fig.4.
Figure.3 Configuration of the proposed S-Shaped antenna .
ranges from 2.4 to 2.45 GHz. A comparison of the results
reveals a good agreement between the three curves.
The performance of the S-shaped antenna is further evaluated
by studying the distribution characteristics of the electric field
as well as the magnetic and surface current, as can be shown
in Fig. 6. Following the simulation results presented in Fig. 6
(a), the distribution of the surface current is the same on the
top and bottom surface of the S-shaped antenna. Moreover, it
can be noted that the electric current is mainly located on the
edge of the S-shaped antenna, which proves that it presents the
radiating element of the antenna. When the surface current
becomes strong along the edge of antenna, it changes the
direction and cancels itself. The opposite directionality of the
current movement (in 8 parts of the proposed antenna) creates
a strong and uniform electromagnetic field over a larger area,
as can be interpreted in figures 6(b) and (c).
Depending on the surface current density distributed on the s-
shaped antenna, the resulting radiation pattern of the antenna
becomes bidirectional with a high gain. Fig.7 shows that the
main lobe of the E-plane and H-plane radiate vertically and
horizontally, respectively; verifying the opposite and strong
directions of the currents. The variation of the gain and
directivity for proposed S-Shaped antenna against the
frequency are shown in fig.8. It can be observed that both of
gain and directivity increase simultaneously in the whole SHF
band (2.4-2.485 GHz). The simulated and measured gains are
approximately the same and meet the requirements of RFID
smart parking applications.

-5

-10

-15 Simulated result (CST)

Simulated result (ADS)
S11(dB)

-20 Measured result

(a) -25

-30

-35

-40
2,20 2,25 2,30 2,35 2,40 2,45 2,50 2,55 2,60
Frequency(GHz)

Figure.5 Simulated and measured reflection coefficient S11 of

(b) the proposed S-Shaped antenna
Figure.4 Photograph of the Fabricated S-SHaped .
antenna(a)top view (b)Bottom view

TABLE 1 The Geometrical Parameters for the Proposed S-

Shaped Antenna (unit: mm)
Wt Ww WA WR Wc

110 10 13.51 5.4 8.56

Lt Lw LA LR LD
24 2 10.45 6.31 1

III. RESULTS AND DISCCUSION

Fig. 5 shows the measured and simulated reflection
coefficients S11 results for the fabricated S-Shaped antenna. It
can be seen that the achieved frequency band for |S11|< -10dB (a)

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 8,5

Directivity
Gain
8,0

7,5

Directivity (dBi)
Gain (dB)
(b)
7,0

6,5

6,0
2,36 2,38 2,40 2,42 2,44 2,46 2,48 2,50 2,52 2,54
Frequency (GHz)

(c) Figure.8 Variation of the gain and directivity for proposed S-

Shaped antenna
Figure.6 Distribution of the (a) surface current (b) E field (c)
H filed on the antenna at 2.45 GHz IV CONCLUSION

9
90
Measured In this paper, a new solution for controlling the check-in and
120 60
6
Simulated check-out of vehicles in the car parking by using just one
3 RFID reader antenna has been achieved. This antenna
0
150 30 characterized by a high gain of 7 dB at a bidirectional
-3 radiation pattern, a good S11 adaptation, a small dimension, a
-6 light weight, and a simple design is different from
-9 180 0 contemporary designs found in the literature.
-6

-3

3
-150 -30
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