Services, Use Cases and Future Challenges for Near Field Communication: the StoLPaN Project

Over the last couple of decades, the mobile phones have become more and more integrated in everyday people’s lives. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), at the end of 2009 the penetration of mobile phones in the developed economies was 97% (ITU, 2009 as cited in European Payments Council [EPC], 2010). Not only the penetration has grown, but also functions and services accessible from mobile phones have improved, thanks to the growing availability of communication technologies and to the miniaturization of electronic components inside consumer’s devices. As an example, thanks to location technologies such as GPS, the mobile phone can nowadays be used to locate a person’s position and, thanks to wireless communication technologies, such as Wi-Fi, GPRS and UMTS, personalized content can be delivered on the person’s device. Automatic identification technologies such as RFID are not excluded from this process of integration and convergence of communication interfaces in the worldwide most popular electronic device. In fact, one of the latest short-range auto-ID technologies, named Near Field Communication (NFC), can be described as the integration of an RFID HF reader into a mobile phone, moreover allowing the device to act as a contactless smart card. NFC originates from RFID technology, but differently from the latter it supports bidirectional communication, making possible to overcome the distinction among tag and reader device. From the technical point of view, NFC operates within the unlicensed Radio Frequency band of 13,56 MHz and it is used to provide easy short-range connectivity to different electronic devices. As described in the standards (ISO/IEC 18092, ECMA-340 and ETSI 102.190), the communication distance is up to 20 cm but the real operating distance is strictly related to the antenna dimension and design: if integrated in a mobile phone, the antenna has to be very small and so the communication distance is typically 2-4 cm. The standard for contactless smart cards (ISO/IEC 14443) is also related to NFC operational mode: data stored on the NFC secure chip can be read in the same way proximity cards OF proximity cards. As mobile phones are the most popular personal devices worldwide, extending them with an RFID reader and a “card emulation mode” makes it possible to create a wide set of