Experimental Evaluation of Wireless Transport Package Test with Battery-free Backscatter Sensors

Transport package test represents the integrity check of packaged commercial products exposed to an emulated transportation environment such as vibrations and shocks. This paper examines the practicality of wireless transport package test with a backscatter streaming system with battery-free backscat-ter sensors by extensive experiments. The system bases on Gen2 protocol with a set of streaming extensions. Random vibration and drop tests, defined in an ISO standard, were performed on a test subject PC. The measurement accuracy of the backscatter streaming system was compared with that of wired sensor to reveal that the accuracy of the system is sufficient for basic transport package test conditions. It was confirmed that the wireless, battery-less and lightweight natures of the backscatter sensor facilitate the test preparation and configuration changes, and is advantageous in continuous wireless streaming. In addition to the merits, the limitations of the system in transport package test are also discussed.