A solution that needs constant attention, care, and maintenance is not sustainable in today’s high-paced deployments. Any user expects that a particular engineering deployment should help them decrease manual efforts (and not replace it with some maintenance activities). In addition, RFID solutions are now becoming an integral part of many industries. They must function with minimum downtime or maintenance.
The power consumption and power-saving of RFID are crucial areas to evaluate for any high-functioning environment.
RFID Reader: Power Saving Options for Extensive Battery Life
RFID readers are often operated in areas like supply chains, retail outlets, libraries, and high-functioning places. Therefore, often changing/charging the batteries for readers is not a favorable approach. Readers with higher power consumption have lesser battery life. As such, the key to higher battery life is reducing power consumption.
Here are several ways to reduce power consumption for the RFID:
1. Power-Saving Modes
Battery-operated RFID interrogators have a set of internal power-saving modes. These different modes can offer different levels of power savings. For instance, the reader becomes inactive for a certain amount of time when there are no tags around with the help of the power-saving mode. The reader starts functioning again once the tag is detected back in the range. The only limitation here is that the power-saving modes only save the battery when there are no tags around.
This power-saving approach can be a game-changer in applications like access control, where the reader has to read continuously, yet there are lesser tags to detect. Most importantly, this approach does not hamper the performance of the RFID system.
2. Reducing Reader’s Power Levels
Reducing the power level of an RFID reader is directly compromising the read range of the device. While it saves energy, it is not in proportion with the compromised read range of the reader. The RFID antenna is designed in a way that is most efficient when used at maximum output power. So lowering the power can affect the read range more than the power saving. This approach is easy to implement but can only work where a more extensive read range is not needed.
3. Using the RFID Reader Duty Cycle
There are two ways to leverage the duty cycle to reduce the power consumption of the device. One is to keep the reader on defined off-times and read-times. The other is to use RF off-time parameters to reduce power consumption by the power amplifier. In the latter one, it will turn off the transmission and power down the amplifier in a way that the reader can still read items but with a certain delay.
This approach saves the power without compromising the read range of the system. Therefore, this approach can be ideal to use if the reading speed is not the crucial parameter.
Conclusion
The different power-saving approaches come carrying a different set of compromises. Therefore it is up to the brand to evaluate whether they need to save power by either of the methods mentioned above.
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