Connecting the Mobile Phone with the Internet of Things – Benefits of EPC and NFC Compatibility

Introduction Computers these days are no longer just placed on desktops in the form of stationary machines, they are also embedded into everyday objects. The seamless integration of computing capabilities within physical objects is the foundation for an Internet of Things, which interlinks the physical world of goods and items with the virtual world of services and data bases. The most prominent and widely deployed medium for this Internet of Things is RFID, which enables the real-time linkage of physical artefacts with information systems. On the path towards the goal of ubiquity, the development of the Electronic Product Code (EPC) has been a crucial step for the global adoption of RFID. The EPC specifies a global numbering scheme intended to unambiguously identify any article in the world, with the objective of linking information with the physical flow of goods. The related EPC Gen2 specification, defining an interface for tag-reader communication, has been certified as the ISO 180006C standard. Tags compliant to this standard have been used in several RFID rollouts all over the world, by companies such as Wal-Mart and Metro. The expanding adoption of RFID technology – 1.3 billion passive RFID tags were sold in 2006 – prepares the ground for the control of logistic processes and supply-chain movements at item-level in real-time. Simultaneously, the widespread adoption of mobile phones – 3 billion users in 2006 worldwide – provides evidence for the tremendous penetration of permanent connectivity into everyday life. The advent of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, enhancing mobile phones with RFID capabilities such as acting as a smartcard or RFID tag, as well as reading smartcards and RFID tags, takes the permanent connectivity phenomenon an important step further: NFC enabled mobile phones connect a completely new group of users to everyday items and, as such, extend the role of mobile phones by new forms of communication between people and objects. Whereas the driving forces of NFC have not fully comprehended the need for also networking RFIDenabled items as an Internet of Things, the developers of the EPC network currently have mainly industrial uses of such a network in mind. In this paper we discuss the combination of EPC and NFC as a means to unleash the Internet of Things into the hands of endconsumers. We investigate the benefits of enabling individuals to read EPC tags with mobile phones and detail the steps necessary to achieve that goal.