Industry group to advance ‘near field’ wireless

An industry group last week released an architecture and initial specifications for a wireless technology with a range of inches that can be used to automate data sharing and transactions by mobile devices.

The work from the Near Field Communications (NFC) Forum is the group’s first step toward a set of protocols that will let smart-phones with NFC chips quickly launch a range of applications to track items, collect data, read text, link to Web resources and pay for purchases.

Forum members include American Express and Visa, NFC start-up MobileLime, Intel, Sony and carriers such as Sprint.

Although many forum vendors focus on consumer applications for NFC, one of the group’s founders, Nokia, has been focusing on a range of enterprise applications.

Nokia last year introduced NFC capabilities on a trio of smart-phones, along with client code and a server application, called Nokia Field Force Services Manager. Variants of NFC already are deployed in credit cards with embedded microchips and other tokens for making so-called contactless payments.

The idea driving the NFC Forum is simple: Bring or touch together two devices (such as cell phones), and the NFC chips and software stacks automatically set up a peer-to-peer network and let the devices exchange a range of data. The same devices will be able to collect data from any object with a matching RFID tag.

“Today the mobile phone’s main application is voice,” says Gerhard Romen, who chairs the NFC Forum’s marketing committee. “But imagine what you actually have in your hands: a processor of a couple of hundred megahertz, an operating system, it can run Java, Internet connectivity, a user interface with a screen and keyboard. With NFC capabilities, you can make using the cell phone really simple in data applications.”

The high-frequency radio runs in the 13.56-MHz unlicensed ISM band, with a range of just 4 to 8 inches. The physical layer is defined mainly by the ISO 18092 standard based on several standards from the ISO and ECMA standards bodies. It supports a range of existing smart-card protocols, such as Sony’s FeliCa and Philips’ Mifare.

Forum members and others see NFC fitting into other radio technologies, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other RFID implementations. NFC has neither the range nor the throughput (at just 212Kbps maximum) to act as a heavyweight data transport, according to Erik Michielsen, director of RFID and machine-to-machine studies at ABI Research.

But making NFC chips a standard feature on smart-phones, NFC-enabled applications can collect data and launch transactions that then make use of other wireless transports. “It’s just easier than Bluetooth [for example]: You just touch and enable,” Michielsen says.

A November 2005 study by Venture Development notes that the spread of the cell phone and the growth of cellular data services have created a “new de facto wireless communications infrastructure.” With this framework, NFC-enabled cell phones will make it possible to bring e-commerce into the wireless space. As Nokia’s Field Services Manager product shows, the same holds true for a range of enterprise data collection and transaction applications.

The forum’s architecture covers the Logical Link Control Protocol, record-type definitions, data exchange formats and smart- card emulation so an NFC smart-phone can function like a credit card with an embedded microchip.

The forum is developing three definitions for the RFID tags that will be readable by NFC client devices. One is for “smart posters,” which have an embedded tag containing text, audio or other data that the NFC client device can read or use. The second is for text, which will let an NFC device read plain-text records. The third is for uniform resource identifiers, which basically are Web URLs that the NFC handheld can pull from a tag and then access through a cellular data call to the Internet.