Novel Spiral Antenna Design Using Artificial Bee Colony Optimization for UHF RFID Applications

TLDR

The study designs a compact planar spiral antenna for passive UHF RFID tags, optimizing size, gain, conjugate matching, and read range with the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm. Antenna dimensions were optimized and evaluated using ABC in conjunction with commercial electromagnetic software, and fabricated prototypes were experimentally tested for reading efficiency. ABC outperformed other evolutionary algorithms, yielding antennas under 3 cm with 1.6 dBi gain and ~6 m read range, as confirmed by simulation and measurement.

Abstract

In this letter, a new planar spiral antenna for passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tag application at UHF band is designed and optimized using the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. The optimization goals are antenna size minimization, gain maximization, conjugate matching, and in consequence the maximization of the read range. The antenna dimensions were optimized and evaluated using ABC in conjunction with commercial electromagnetic (EM) software. The comparison of the results obtained by ABC to respective ones of other popular evolutionary algorithms show that ABC can be efficiently applied to tag antenna design problems. To validate the theoretical results, designed RFID tags were fabricated, and their reading efficiency was evaluated experimentally. The results of simulation and those received via measurements prove that the proposed method for the design of passive RFID tag antennas is efficient, as antennas with dimensions less than 3 cm, gain that reaches the value of 1.6 dBi, and read range about 6 m were obtained.