Direction of Wireless Access Convergence; Can Near Field Communication (NFC) Be a Member of Future Internet?

This paper gives bird’s-eye view of a variety of wireless access systems with respect to communication protocol structure. As these technologies evolve to higher datatransmission rates, there is more affinity with the Internet protocols. This observation motivates discussions of wireless access convergence in the future. For instance, communication protocols for IC-cards and RFIDs, which are quite different from TCP/IP, may get affinity with Internet protocols, if they gain higher data throughput in the future owing to emerging radio technologies. The authors have picked NFC up as an example to enhance its standardized protocol to let it be more intimate with the Internet. The cross-layer approach is taken to enhance today’s standardized NFC protocol, while keeping backward compatibility. The enhanced NFC protocols are proposed and evaluated in terms of performance and complexity. As the result, the authors show the possibility of future convergence in the wireless access arena.