Near Field Communication Bluetooth Bridge System for Mobile Commerce.doc

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Near Field Communication & BluetoothBridge 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



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



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 non-

NFC 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 infra-

red 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.



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 SYSTEMThe 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

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

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

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 today’s 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.

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

“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].



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].



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 consumer’s 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

product’s price and availability. It also retrieves information such as the buyer’s

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 merchant’s

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

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.

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.

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 source’s 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 receiver’s 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.



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 NFC-

Bluetooth 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



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.

REFERENCES1] 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.


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Near Field Communication Bluetooth Bridge System for Mobile Commerce.doc