QUANTITATIVE METHODS FOR COMPUTING

Quantitative Methods for Computing



Quantitative Methods for Computing

Introduction

More and more people are using smartphones today, and almost every new phone has innovations to make life easier and more comfortable. One of recent innovations to the smartphone is Near Field Communication (NFC), which provides the ability to transmit information over a short distance. Both cell phone manufacturers and service companies are convinced this technology has great potential (Strommer, Hillukkala, & Ylisaukko-oja, 2007).

The number of smartphones with implemented NFC has increased rapidly and is expected to continue to grow more in coming years (Pope & Pantages. 2011: 88).

Alone or in combination with other smartphone features, NFC has the potential to bring numerous benefits to its users, including: cashless payments, the ability to use the smartphone in place of traditional credit or debit cards (Bodhani, 2011); user identification, allowing the phone's owner to provide proof of identity with built-in biometric recognition or password protection (Derawi, McCallum, Witte, & Bours, 2012); and data retrieval, allowing information exchange between two smartphones or a smartphone and a stationary node designed for that purpose (Morak & Hayn, 2009: 15). These features have the potential of increasing marketplace efficiency, reducing costs to both purchasers and retailers if the infrastructure is put into place.

Literature Review

NFC is a wireless communication technology that enables machine-to-machine data transfer over a short range using the concept of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). NFC-equipped devices can be utilized in three different modes. First, NFC-equipped smartphones can be used in a read/write mode, with the phone as the active component, the one that generates the field, to interact with a passive tag. The range to which this field is generated is short, reliable to about ten centimeters (Chandra & Srivastava, 2010: 561). This is the source of the name, Near Field Communication.

The passive tags can act as an address, directing the smartphone to a repository of information. So, for example, a tag might be placed on or near a product for sale, a bookshelf in a library, or a map in a park. When an NFC-enabled smartphone is moved near the tag, the phone downloads the appropriate materials, such as the specifications for the item, a list of books on the shelf, or information about nearby sights in the park (Bodhani, 2011: 56). Second, A NFC-equipped device can be used as Peer-to-Peer mode (Strommer, Hillukkala, & Ylisaukko-oja, 2007; Nambi et al., 2012; Serfass, 2012) by allowing two users to exchange information between their devices, such as music playlists, contacts, and even medical data (Morak, 2009). Similarly, information could be exchanged between a NFC-equipped smartphone and a kiosk installed for that purpose.

This provides greater speed, reliability, and security than the regular cell phone transmission system because the smartphone is connecting to a wired node, and the signal is transmitted to such a short range rather than broadcasting. A final mode for an NFC-enabled device is card emulation mode, in which the NFC device behaves in the same way ...