Near Field Communication and Bluetooth Bridge System for Mobile Commerce

This paper presents an innovation of a Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth bridge system for connecting Bluetooth enabled mobile devices to NFC enabled consumer services. Nowadays, there is an abundance of mobile phones and PDAs with Bluetooth capability in the consumer market but there are fewer devices with NFC capability. In order for NFC enabled consumer services and payment to be rapidly adopted in the consumer market, it is therefore important to make the service available to a larger sector of the consumer market without NFC connectivity. The proposed system comprises a NFC-Bluetooth bridge and a software driver program. The NFC-Bluetooth bridge is an electronic device with two air interfaces: Bluetooth and NFC. The Bluetooth air interface is for establishing a wireless connectivity with Bluetooth devices and the NFC air interface is for establishing a wireless connectivity with NFC devices. The software driver is a tiny software program for driving communication between the Bluetooth and NFC devices and can be downloaded and run in mobile devices. This paper presents the system architecture and computational algorithms for the proposed system, and also illustrates its use for mobile consumer service and payment.