Ishan Bansal

Ishan Bansal

he/him

PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, building wireless, battery-free sensing systems. Previously a software developer at Cisco.

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portfolio

publications

ZenseTag: An RFID assisted Twin-Tag Single Antenna COTS Sensor Interface

Published in Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys '24), 2024

A fully passive, 15x10 mm flexible sensor interface that reads commercial force, soil-moisture, and light sensors using only energy harvested from wireless signals. Earned all 5 ACM artifact evaluation badges.

Recommended citation: Nagarjun Bhat, Agrim Gupta, Ishan Bansal, Harine Govindarajan, and Dinesh Bharadia. 2024. "ZenseTag: An RFID assisted Twin-Tag Single Antenna COTS Sensor Interface." In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys '24), pp. 336–350.
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Demo - ZenseTag: Real-Time Passive RFID Sensing

Published in Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom '24), 2024

Best Demo Runner-Up. A live demonstration of ZenseTag reading force, soil-moisture, and light sensors in real time over passive RFID.

Recommended citation: Ishan Bansal, Nagarjun Bhat, Agrim Gupta, Harine Govindarajan, and Dinesh Bharadia. 2024. "ZenseTag: Real-Time Passive RFID Sensing." In Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom '24), pp. 1757–1759.
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SenSync: Real-Time and Accurate Passive Sensing

Published in 2025 IEEE International Conference on RFID (IEEE RFID '25), 2025

Best Paper Award. Algorithms that align time-shifted data from multiple RFID ICs and resolve phase ambiguity, improving sensory resolution 5x with a 0.79° median phase error in dynamic environments.

Recommended citation: Ishan Bansal, Nagarjun Bhat, Agrim Gupta, Harine Govindarajan, and Dinesh Bharadia. 2025. "SenSync: Real-Time and Accurate Passive Sensing." In 2025 IEEE International Conference on RFID (RFID), Atlanta, GA, USA, pp. 1–6.
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Demo Abstract - SIGAR: Sensor Integration Gateway using Augmented Reality

Published in Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys '25), 2025

Best Demo Runner-Up. Combines battery-free RFID sensing with augmented reality: a smartphone app detects sensors and overlays their live readings on the camera feed.

Recommended citation: Ishan Bansal, Nagarjun Bhat, Agrim Gupta, Harine Govindarajan, and Dinesh Bharadia. 2025. "Demo Abstract - SIGAR: Sensor Integration Gateway using Augmented Reality." In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys '25), pp. 696–697.
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TuneTag: Impedance-Matched RFID Tag for Long-Range and Reliable Battery-Free Sensing

Published in IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification, 2025

A passive sensing platform with a custom impedance-matched RFID tag and a low-complexity algorithm for commercial readers: 5x sensing accuracy, 2.4x range, and 5x faster, sub-second response than state-of-the-art systems.

Recommended citation: Ishan Bansal, Nagarjun Bhat, Harine Govindarajan, Agrim Gupta, and Dinesh Bharadia. 2025. "TuneTag: Impedance-Matched RFID Tag for Long-Range and Reliable Battery-Free Sensing." IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification, vol. 9, pp. 827–840.
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teaching