RoSense: Refining LOS Signal Phase for Robust RFID Sensing via Spinning Antenna

RFID sensing leveraging backscatter signal features (e.g., phase shift) from tags has gained increasing popularity in numerous applications but also suffers from negative impacts of environmental multipaths. Past works to address it rely on extra customized devices, labor-intensive offline training, or frequency channel hopping, all of which are non-ubiquitous or ineffective for real-life adoption. This article presents RoSense, a universal method to alleviate multipath reflections’ impacts by spinning the reader antenna, thus enabling more robust RFID sensing. Besides, RoSense requires no RF devices or offline training and operates in a nonintrusive manner. The key insight of RoSense is to exploit two properties of line-of-sight (LOS) signal when spinning the antenna, i.e., the linearity of phase changes and stability of received signal strength to attenuate the nonlinear and nonmonotonic effect of multipath signals and refine the phase shift of LOS signal. We have implemented a prototype of RoSense with COTS devices and studied two cases for evaluation: 1) material identification and 2) object localization. Experimental results show that RoSense can improve the material identification accuracy by up to 16.22% and reduce the mean localization error by up to 39.93%, greatly outperforming the state-of-the-art solutions.