Dimitrios Angelou and Aggelos Bletsas selected as best paper finalist at IEEE RFID 2025

A paper from Dimitrios Angelou (Technical Univ. of Crete) and Aggelos Bletsas (Rutgers University) was selected among the best paper finalists in the 19th annual IEEE International Conference on RFID, April 22-24, Atlanta, USA.

Kindly see list of finalist papers here: https://2025.ieee-rfid.org/

The paper title and full citation follows:  

Dimitrios Angelou and Aggelos Bletsas, “Real-time, Multistatic RFID Localization with Commodity, Unsynchronized Radios”, IEEE International Conference on RFID, April 2025, Atlanta, GA, USA.  

The paper shows real-time localization of batteryless commodity radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, using distributed software-defined radios (SDR), which are completely unsynchronized, i.e., they are not connected to a common source of carrier frequency. Such common reference typically requires expensive wiring and a common generator or specialized synchronization equipment (e.g., reception from GPS). The paper uses a playback technique and achieves carrier frequency offset elimination on the fly; in addition, it employs the elliptical localization method, devised by the group.

A demo can be found here (the antennas at the bottom of the board are connected to independent, unconnected SDRs):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYWwYV0dL_g

The problem of carrier-level synchronization in distributed multi-antenna wireless system, even though fundamental, is typically overlooked by the research community. Existing focus of many research groups is on distributed antenna systems, e.g., integrated sensing and communication, cell-free MIMO, coordinated MIMO, to name a few. This work is a small step towards real-time, distributed localization, with limited overhead and cost.

A large part of the work was conducted during Dimitrios Angelou summer 2024 internship at WINLAB, Dept. of ECE, Rutgers University.

Congratulations to Dimitrios and Prof. Bletsas!