The survey on Near Field Communication

PubMed ID: 26057043Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology that offers great and varied promise in services such as payment, ticketing, gaming, crowd sourcing, voting, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the integration of services from a wide range of applications into one single smartphone. NFC technology has emerged recently, and consequently not much academic data are available yet, although the number of academic research studies carried out in the past two years has already surpassed the total number of the prior works combined. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach from different perspectives, including hardware improvement and optimization, communication essentials and standards, applications, secure elements, privacy and security, usability analysis, and ecosystem and business issues. Further research opportunities in terms of the academic and business points of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each section. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians, as well as for business in the NFC technology and ecosystem.Publisher's Versio

IDA-Pay: a secure and efficient micro-payment system based on Peer-to-Peer NFC technology for Android mobile devices

The evolution of modern mobile devices towards novel Radio Frequency (RF) capabilities, such as Near Field Communication, leads to a potential for delivering innovative mobile services, which is still partially unexplored. Mobile proximity payment systems are going to enhance the daily shopping experience, but the access to payment security resources of a mobile device (e.g. the “Secure Element”) by third party applications is still blocked by smartphone and Operating System manufacturers. In this paper, the IDA-Pay system is presented, an innovative and secure NFC micro-payment system based on Peer-to-Peer NFC operating mode for Android mobile phones. It allows to deliver mobile-to-POS micro-payment services, bypassing the need for special hardware. A validation scenario and a system evaluation are also reported to demonstrate the system effectiveness and performance

Design Time Methodology for the Formal Modeling and Verification of Smart Environments

Smart Environments (SmE) are intelligent and complex due to smart connectivity and interaction of heterogeneous devices achieved by complicated and sophisticated computing algorithms. Based on their domotic and industrial applications, SmE system may be critical in terms of correctness, reliability, safety, security and other such vital factors. To achieve error-free and requirement-compliant implementation of these systems, it is advisable to enforce a design process that may guarantee these factors by adopting formal models and formal verification techniques at design time. The e-Lite research group at Politecnico di Torino is developing solutions for SmE based on integration of commercially available home automation technologies with an intelligent ecosystem based on a central OSGi-based gateway, and distributed collaboration of intelligent applications, with the help of semantic web technologies and applications. The main goal of my research is to study new methodologies which are used for the modeling and verification of SmE. This goal includes the development of a formal methodology which ensures the reliable implementation of the requirements on SmE, by modeling and verifying each component (users, devices, control algorithms and environment/context) and the interaction among them, especially at various stages in design time, so that all the complexities and ambiguities can be reduced

Models and Performance of VANET based Emergency Braking

The network research community is working in the field of automotive to provide VANET based safety applications to reduce the number of accidents, deaths, injuries and loss of money. Several approaches are proposed and investigated in VANET literature, but in a completely network-oriented fashion. Most of them do not take into account application requirements and no one considers the dynamics of the vehicles. Moreover, message repropagation schemes are widely proposed without investigating their benefits and using very complicated approaches. This technical report, which is derived from the Master Thesis of Michele Segata, focuses on the Emergency Electronic Brake Lights (EEBL) safety application, meant to send warning messages in the case of an emergency brake, in particular performing a joint analysis of network requirements and provided application level benefits. The EEBL application is integrated within a Collaborative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) which uses network-provided information to automatically brake the car if the driver does not react to the warning. Moreover, an information aggregation scheme is proposed to analyze the benefits of repropagation together with the consequent increase of network load. This protocol is compared to a protocol without repropagation and to a rebroadcast protocol found in the literature (namely the weighted p-persistent rebroadcast). The scenario is a highway stretch in which a platoon of vehicles brake down to a complete stop. Simulations are performed using the NS_3 network simulation in which two mobility models have been embedded. The first one, which is called Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) emulates the behavior of a driver trying to reach a desired speed and braking when approaching vehicles in front. The second one (Minimizing Overall Braking Induced by Lane change (MOBIL)), instead, decides when a vehicle has to change lane in order to perform an overtake or optimize its path. The original simulator has been modified by - introducing real physical limits to naturally reproduce real crashes; - implementing a CACC; - implementing the driver reaction when a warning is received; - implementing different network protocols. The tests are performed in different situations, such as different number of lanes (one to five), different average speeds, different network protocols and different market penetration rates and they show that: - the adoption of this technology considerably decreases car accidents since the overall average maximum deceleration is reduced; - network load depends on application-level details, such as the implementation of the CACC; - VANET safety application can improve safety even with a partial market penetration rate; - message repropagation is important to reduce the risk of accidents when not all vehicles are equipped; - benefits are gained not only by equipped vehicles but also by unequipped ones