A new simple Wi-Fi direct connection method using NFC on remote control and DTV

Due to the wide use of Wi-Fi technology, recent customer electronics such as smart phone, digital TV, laptop, refrigerator, air conditioner, robot vacuum and etc. provide Wi-Fi communication including Wi-Fi Direct (Peer-to-Peer) communication. For a simple and easy connection management between a smart phone and DTV, near field communication (NFC) is recently introduced. When a user brings a smart phone into close proximity of the NFC equipped remote control, the smart phone can directly connect DTV without peer discovery process of Wi-Fi Direct. In this paper, we implement the simple connection method between a smart phone and a DTV equipped with the NFC enabled remote control. The application of the simple and easy connection management, however, is limited to the NFC equipped customer electronics. Thus, the paper proposes a new simple wireless connection method, called Virtual NFC (VNFC), between a smart phone and existing customer electronics, which have Wi-Fi or BT (Bluetooth) module without NFC, using a set of NFC enabled remote control and DTV. In the proposed system, a set of DTV and NFC equipped remote control acts as virtual NFC device which relay the device information of customer electronics for Wi-Fi Direct connection without the peer discovery procedure. We implement the proposed NFC and VNFC architecture as prototype systems. The NFC based simple Wi-Fi Direct connection method reduces the connection setup time by 49% and the proposed VNFC based method reduces the connection setup time by 60%. The proposed VNFC idea has been registered as patent applications.