  In this paper, we study single transceiver passive RFID networks by modeling
the underlying physical system as a special cascade of a certain broadcast
channel (BCC) and a multiple access channel (MAC), using a "nested codebook"
structure in between. The particular application differentiates this
communication setup from an ordinary cascade of a BCC and a MAC, and requires
certain structures such as "nested codebooks", impurity channels or additional
power constraints. We investigate this problem both for discrete alphabets,
where we characterize the achievable rate region, as well as for continuous
alphabets with additive Gaussian noise, where we provide the capacity region.
Hence, we establish the maximal achievable error free communication rates for
this particular problem which constitutes the fundamental limit that is
achievable by any TDMA based RFID protocol and the achievable rate region for
any RFID protocol for the case of continuous alphabets under additive Gaussian
noise.
