11-01-2012, 10:25 AM
Near Field Communication Network Services
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1. Introduction
Recent years have seen an expansion in the use of
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in industrial
sector helping to streamline logistic processes in
particular. Near Field Communication (NFC) is a spinoff
of RFID with an aim to bring contactless
communication for everyday use. NFC is a radio
frequency interface intended for interactions between
tags and electronic devices in very close proximity.
In addition to its primary purpose of use, i.e.
contactless identification, NFC also enables payment
and ticketing applications and data exchange. The most
prominent target device to act as an NFC reader seems
to be a mobile phone, although currently NFC is also
spreading towards other kinds of electronic appliances
and uses, such as automatic pairing and configuration
of computer peripherals.
2. Motivation and related work
Standardization of NFC is being carried out by
Ecma International, ISO, ETSI and NFC Forum. The
most important standards for NFC are ECMA-340
(NFCIP-1) [1] and ECMA-352 (NFCIP-2) [2]. Former
specifies the RF signal interface and transport protocol
including initialization and collision avoidance for
wireless communication between closely coupled
devices which communicate at data rates of 106, 212,
and 424 kbps. Latter specification defines a mechanism
to detect and select one communication mode out of
ECMA-340 (NFC mode), ISO/IEC 14443 (proximity
mode), and ISO/IEC 15693 (vicinity mode), which all
operate at 13.56 MHz frequency band but use different
protocols.
3. NFC network services
Network driven Near Field Communication services
allow mobile phone to utilize network and server
resources, which allow NFC services to work as real
time. Moreover, this model allows network service
operator to decide what services are offered with
certain NFC tags.
We first describe our proposal for a new NFC
gateway service protocol in detail and then go on to
discuss the security considerations in communication
between client application and NFC gateway. Security
issues related to NFC interface itself are out of scope
for this paper. They are thoroughly discussed for
example in [9]. RFID security issues in general are
listed in [10].
3.1 Service protocol
NFC gateway protocol is an application level
protocol designed for communication between mobile
phone and NFC gateway. Its sole purpose is to enable
network driven NFC services.
Since NFC gateway protocol operates on mobile
environment short on processing and memory
resources, it must be lightweight. CPU power and
memory restrictions are the main reasons why we have
chosen to use binary protocol instead of XML-based
protocol. The header load of a binary protocol is
notably smaller than the header load of an XML-based
protocol.
