www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.

com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

Near Field Communication & Bluetooth Bridge System for Mobile Commerce.

Abstract
This paper presents an innovation of a Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth bridge system for connecting Bluetooth enabled mobile devices to NFC enabled consumer services. Nowadays, there is an abundance of mobile phones and PDA s with Bluetooth capability in the consumer market but there are fewer devices with NFC capability. In order for NFC enabled consumer services and payment to be rapidly adopted in the consumer market, it is therefore important to make the service available to a larger sector of the consumer market without NFC connectivity. The proposed system comprises a NFC-Bluetooth bridge and a software driver program. The NFC-Bluetooth bridge is an electronic device with two air interfaces: Bluetooth and NFC. The Bluetooth air interface is for establishing a wireless connectivity with Bluetooth devices and the NFC air interface is for establishing a wireless connectivity with NFC devices. The software driver is a tiny www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com software program for driving communication between the Bluetooth and NFC devices and can be downloaded and run in mobile devices. This paper presents the system architecture and computational algorithms for the proposed system, and also illustrates its use for mobile consumer service and payment. Index Terms Radio Frequency Identification, Middleware, Near Field Communication, Electronic Payment.

INTRODUCTION
Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging wireless technology that is designed to facilitate secure, short-range communication between electronic devices such as mobile phones, personal data assistants (PDAs), computers and payment terminals. The concept is simple: in order to make two devices communicate, bring them together or make them touch. This will engage the wireless interface of the two devices and configure them to link up in a peer-to-peer network [1]. Once the device is linked up using NFC, they can continue communication using long range and faster protocols such as Bluetooth or wireless Internet (Wi Fi). A potential killer application of NFC is mobile commerce wherein contact less payment using NFC-enabled mobile phone enables secure and convenient purchases in a wide range of transactions including making a purchase at a coffee shop, downloading a movie trailer in a DVD shop, shopping from a TV at home, buying movie or concert tickets from a smart poster Using mobile phone for mobile commerce is not new. However, the earlier attempt using the wireless application protocol (WAP) has not proven to be successful. One of the reasons is poor usability with WAP. Users are often required to navigate through long menus and enter several user names and passwords on tiny mobile phone keypads and displays. A recent usability study by Philips and Visa [2] on the usability of NFC and contact less payment reported that participants accepted and appreciated www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com the concept of incorporating information transfer and secure payment functionality into mobile phones. This was attributed to the easy to understand, convenient and fast features of the Philips NFC technology and Visa contact less payment. Extensive trials of NFC mobile payment have been carried out in several regions. In USA, Philips and Visa carried out a trial at the Philips Arena Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia in which sports fans could easily buy goods at concession standard apparel stores, and they could also download mobile content such as ring tones and wallpapers from favorite players and artists by holding their NFC-enabled phone in front of the poster embedded with NFC tag. In France, Philips, in collaboration with France Telecom, Orange Samsung, and retailer Group LaSer and Vinci Park, carried out a trial in which participating residents used the Samsung D500 mobile phones with the embedded Philips NFC chip as a means of secured payment in selected retail stores, parking facilities, and to download information about famous tourist sites, movie trailers and bus schedules. Trials on secured payment for public transportation using NFC mobile phones were also conducted in Germany and Taiwan. The above study and trials have cleared the usability hurdle and proven the usefulness of the NFC technology. However, success of the NFC technology is also dependent on the economics of scale and mass adoption. Currently, there are not many NFC phones available in the market and it is also not reasonable to expect the majority of the consumer to switch over from their nonNFC devices in a short timeframe. However, it is still important to enable the majority with non-NFC devices to access to NFC-enabled services. It is now a common scene that mobile phone users take pictures with built-in cameras and use the Bluetooth functionality to transfer pictures and to download ring tones, wallpapers and games. Bluetooth is a preferred connectivity as compared to infrared because the former is fast and does not require a line of sight. To enable the non-NFC devices with Bluetooth connectivity to access to NFC enabled services, this paper proposes the idea of a NFC-Bluetooth bridge system and illustrates its use on a mobile commerce application.

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com The contributions of this paper include an architecture design of a NFC-Bluetooth bridge system. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the NFC-Bluetooth bridge system. Section III presents an application of the proposed system for mobile payment. Finally, Section IV concludes.

II. NFC-BLUETOOTH BRIDGE SYSTEM

The system architecture of the NFC-Bluetooth Bridge System is shown in Fig. 1. It comprises a Bluetooth enabled device, the proposed NFC-Bluetooth Bridge and an NFC card which is embedded on a smart poster.

The NFC-Bluetooth Bridge is a separate electronic device with two different air interfaces: Bluetooth (BT) and NFC. In our prototype development, the serial NFC PN531 module from Philips Electronics was used to provide the NFC air interface, and the serial Initium promi D102 Bluetooth adapter was used to provide the Bluetooth air interface. Both the NFC module and the bluetooth www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com adapter were connected by a RS232 cable and communicated using the following RS232 protocol: 9600 baud, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit and no parity bit. The Bluetooth adapter was configured to the discoverable and connectable mode. This mode allows the adapter to be discovered when a mobile device searches for it by the device name. Password authentication was enabled for pairing of the two Bluetooth devices. The Bluetooth and NFC modules require a 5 VDC power supply each. A PCB (labeled as PS in Fig. 1) is used to share the power drawn from an external power supply to the two component modules. Driver software is needed in the mobile device to drive the NFC PN531 on the NFC-Bluetooth Bridge to react to NFC

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com targets that are tapped between each other, and to send and receive information

In Fig. 2, the various components, in the ordering of the labels, are (1) the Initium Promi SD 102 Bluetooth adapter, (2) an antenna for the NFC PN531, (3) the NFC PN531 board, (4) the power supply distributor PCB, and (5) a short custom-made DCE-DCE serial cable to connect the two main components. A www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com DCE-DCE serial cable pin configuration is shown in Fig. 3 below. Note that the Promi SD 102 Bluetooth adapter receives its power from pin 9 (VCC), hence it is connected to the +5V of the power supply distributor PCB.

The final Bluetooth-NFC Bridge product is expected to be an embedded device of the size of todays smallest MP3 player. The biggest portion of the body of the device will likely be the battery compartment and the NFC antenna. An alternative build (size of half a card) that draws power from its host (such as a mobile phone) that can be attached within the cover of the mobile phone is planned. However, the feasibility is not confirmed at the point of writing this paper. At this stage of time, the expected ownership of the NFC-Bluetooth device belongs to the owner of the host (the Bluetooth device). However, the authors do not rule out the possibility of such a device to be owned by the owners of the NFC targets.

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

Bluetooth Connection
The design of the software uses the Serial Port Profile (SPP) over Bluetooth. The Bluetooth link between the Promi SD102 and the mobile phone encapsulates the serial information between the mobile phone and the NFC PN531 as shown in Fig. 4. Effectively, the NFC PN531 sends and receives information as if it was connected directly to a serial port on the mobile phone. The software was developed as a MIDlet, a small program for Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) compliant devices, with Java 2 Platform Micro Edition (J2ME) and Java APIs for Bluetooth (JSR 82) [3]. The software performs the three operations to establish connection with the PN531 inquiry, discovery and connection, all of which are accessible with the JSR 82 APIs.

To start off, the program makes an inquiry to find the NFC-Bluetooth bridge device using the device name. Alternatively, the program can search by using the MAC address of the Bluetooth device. For this prototype, the Bluetooth adapter MAC address is 000B531305AB hexadecimal. Once the bridge is located within the radio range of the mobile phone, the next step is to discover the SPP service offered by the Bluetooth adapter. The Bluetooth adapter would return the SPP service Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in response with the prefix of btspp. In the prototype, the URL for the SPP service of the Bluetooth adapter is www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com btspp://000B531305AB:1. The suffix :1 in the URL represents the port number used by the SPP. After the discovery operation, a connection is automatically made to the SPP URL. For the first time, the program will prompt user for a password for authentication in pairing the mobile phone with the Bluetooth adapter. After this step, a serial connection is established between the mobile phone and the NFC-Bluetooth Bridge for subsequent data communication. The inquiry and discovery steps may take a rather long time to complete. As such, these steps are carried out for the first connection in order to retrieve the SPP URL. They are skipped in subsequent connections with the Bluetooth adapter since the program can reuse the SPP URL from the previous connection.

NFC Connection
The PN531 NFC module follows a set of commands and formats that must be adhered to in order to drive it. Each data packet to and from the PN531 are framed in the format as shown in Fig. 5 and Table 1. The commands for the PN531 are to be placed in the data packet segment (Segment PD0 to PDn in Fig. 5). Each command has an identification byte at PD0. The most important command used with the PN531 for this project is the In Data Exchange command. It is used for reading or writing onto NFC targets such as the Mifare cards used in the payment application in the prototype demonstration. The structure of the command is described in Fig. 6 and the descriptions in Table 2 [4].

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

The payloads of the data exchanged (Data Out[] and Data In[]) vary with the type of NFC target the PN531 is connected to. Of the four types of targets, namely Mifare, ISO14434-4, Felica and Data Exchange Protocol (DEP), the Mifare target was used in the prototype development. The structure for the Data Out[] is as shown in Fig. 7 and is described in Table 3. The structure for the DataIn[] is a 16 bytes return data from a read operation [5].

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

MOBILE COMMERCE APPLICATION

The NFC-Bluetooth bridge system was demonstrated on a mobile commerce application involving a Merchant Card System and a Payment system. In addition, the bridge was also tested for a fund transfer mobile commerce application known as Peer-to-Peer System.

Merchant

Card System
In the Merchant Card System (MCS), the merchant requires only an RFID card as a representation for payment of a certain product or service he is selling. The RFID card provides a specially designed URL, unique to the product or service, to the consumers mobile phone when they are tapped onto each other. With the URL, the mobile phone is connected to the Goods and Payment Portal (GPP) on the Internet. The GPP is a web server that provides a login web service for participating merchants to manage their RFID cards and information for their customers such as the www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com products price and availability. It also retrieves information such as the buyers identity verification and the purchase details. Finally, the GPP informs the merchant of any goods sold. The conventional mobile payment method using WAP requires the consumer to type in the URL of the web site. On the web site, the consumer is subjected to tedious selection of the service or product he desires from a long menu on his small mobile phone screen. In comparison, the MCS and the RFID card adds much more user-friendliness to mobile payment by removing the needs for long menu navigation and extensive data typing. The identification code of the service or product is stored in the NFC card together with the URL of the service provider. The NFC system automatically connects to the GPP with the right product or service code obtained from the NFC scanning The MCS offers a very attractive cost proposition to the merchants, as the cost price of each RFID card is approximately US$1. The merchant can expand his reach to his customers with several RFID cards at different places. For example, the RFID card can be embedded on the merchants advertisement posters that are displayed on train stations, allowing his customers to make immediate purchases at these locations without having to queue up. The MCS in this case maximizes promotion effectiveness yet minimizes the costs. For the consumers, they benefit by not having to queue up for goods and services and taking purchases anywhere as they walk.

The merchant card system can be used for both intangible services and products such as cinema ticket sales and tangible products based on centralized collection such as fast food restaurants. For example, cinema operators can place a Mobile NETS RFID card behind each poster of all the now showing movies. The consumers initiate purchases of tickets by tapping the poster of the desired movie with his mobile phone. Likewise, fast food restaurants can embed an RFID card on

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com every table together with the menu. Consumers will be able to order the food just by tapping their mobile phones on the respective food items.

Peer-To-System
The Peer-to-Peer System (P2PS) provides electronic transfer of cash between two owners of NFC-enabled mobile phones based on the similar principle of the MCS. The mobile phones exchange a common URL and connect to the GPP for fund transfer. This system targets private transaction such as an E-Bay meet-up transaction, and small time merchants who do not wish to be burdened with the cost of owning equipment for the other non-cash payment methods.

Application Software (Mobile Client)

Application software was developed to handle transactions for both the MCS and the P2PS. The software is built as a MIDlet, a small program for Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) compliant devices, with Java 2 Platform Micro Edition (J2ME). The J2ME application serves as a communication and an interface tool. With the J2ME application, the communication between RFID, NFC, SMS (Short Messaging Service), and GPRS (General Radio Packet Service) can be made seamless without the explicit need for user input. This factor is extremely crucial in simplifying the system for mass consumers. The interface tool increases the range of user interface options available and greatly improves usability. The software is divided into four modules: controller, interface, contactless and mobile communication. Controller. The controller portion keeps track of the stages of a purchase or a fund transfer transaction. Its role is like the brain of the software, giving directions to the other portions on their next operations. The java class files for the controller are BuyManager.java and TransferCash.java.

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com Interface. Information display and menu selection are determined upon the retrieval of the specific unique RFID and NFC identification data. These data are matched with the online database from GPP that provides the required display and menu information to the mobile devices. The interface is handled in MobileNETS.java. Contact less. This portion handles the reading and writing synchronization of the RFID or NFC targets. The class file is Read Contactless .java. Mobile Communication. This portion handles the communication with the GPP via SMS and GPRS services. It is responsible for organizing the data to be exchanged with the GPP, and converting the data to and from Extensible Markup Language (XML) format following a protocol agreed with the designer of the GPP Server. It handles encryption of the data as well. The class files for mobile communication are HTTPManager.java and SMSManager.java.

State Transition
The program state transition diagrams for MCS and P2PS applications are shown in Fig. 2 and 3 respectively. When the program is started, it is set to a waiting state, detecting for an NFC target that is tapped between the mobile phone. Upon tapping a Mifare Classic 1K RFID card, the program proceeds to launch the merchant card system purchasing process. If the mobile phone detects another NFC mobile phone target, the software starts the peer-to-peer fund transfer process as a fund receiver.

A. Merchant Card System Purchasing Process

1. The software authenticates the validity of the merchant RFID card tapped by checking its unique identifier (UID) with the GPP via GPRS. An encryption secret key unique to each transaction session will be returned from the GPP. Subsequent data transfer between the mobile phone and the GPP will be encrypted with the secret key. www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com 2.The software requests a list of products associated to the merchant RFID card from the GPRS for the user to select for purchase. 3. The software requests the details of the product selected for purchase. The user can specify the quantity and other options for the product he wishes to purchase. 4. The software submits the user inputs and obtains a quotation of the total price of the desired purchases. The user keys in his personal identification number (PIN) of his bank account to confirm the purchases. The information is sent over SMS to the GPP as the GPP can verify the sources telephone number and for the added security (SMS is difficult to intercept). 5. The software retrieves the confirmation of the transaction via SMS.

B. Peer-to-Peer Fund Transfer

Process A user who wishes to transfer funds specifies the amount he wishes to transfer and taps his mobile phone on the receivers mobile phone. Upon tapping, there are 3 steps in completing the fund transferring: 1. The software submits the amount to transfer, and the two parties information to the GPP via GPRS. An encryption secret key for the mobile phone usage is returned. 2. The user keys in his personal identification number (PIN) of his bank account to confirm the fund transfer. The information is sent over SMS to the GPP. 3. The software on both the two parties mobile phone receives the confirmation of the fund transfer over SMS.

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

IV. CONCLUSIONS
With Japan and South Korea as precedents, Mobile Internet Banking is likely to be popular in Singapore once there is greater consumer acceptance and usage of mobile data services. With NFC technologies and the NFC-Bluetooth bridge that offer consumers an alternative to purchasing new NFC-enabled mobile phones, consumers are more encouraged to adopt mobile payment. There are also immense possibilities for the creation of new markets with the merchant card system peer-to-peer transaction. The NFCBluetooth bridge system proposed in this paper opens an access to NFC-enabled services for a wider market of consumers with non-NFC devices. The merchant card system makes extensive use of the NFC capabilities of future mobile phones and tremendously lowers the merchants costs of transactions. The low cost is expected to entice merchants to adopt the system and serves as a good initiation for the technology adoption. When there is a critical mass of merchants accepting this payment mode, consumers will then be attracted to use Mobile Internet Payment with NFC-enabled www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com phones. When equipped with NFC-enabled phones, consumers will be able to participate in the peer-to-peer transaction. The peer-to-peer transaction system is a new untapped market that may prove lucrative for payment companies such as NETS. This new market enables them to reach out to the individuals and small merchants who are not using current card processing equipment due to the high fixed costs.

REFERENCES
1] ECMA, Near Field Communication Whitepaper, ECMA International, 2004 2] Philips, Philips and Visa Usability Study about NFC, 2006. 3] Sun Microsystems, Java APIs for Bluetooth JSR 82 Specifications, 2002. 4] UM0301-06 PN531 User Manual, Philips Semiconductors. 5] Mifare Standard Card IC MF1 IC S50 Functional Specification, Philips Semiconductors.

www.1000projects.com www.fullinterview.com www.chetanasprojects.com