Anti-Collision Protocol for Coexistence of RFID and NFC P2P Communications

Abstract

The near field communication (NFC) is a short-range wireless communication technology operating at 13.56 MHz. A pair of NFC devices may operate in the peer-to-peer (P2P) mode to exchange data securely. Since the frequency of both the existing radio frequency identification (RFID) systems and NFC devices is 13.56 MHz, a collision may occur in an environment where pairs of NFC devices coexist within the identification range of an RFID system. In this letter, we propose an anti-collision protocol in the coexistence environment where the NFC device in the P2P communication mode is interfered by an RFID system. In the proposed protocol, if the channel is already occupied or a collision is detected, an NFC initiator device switches its operating mode to the card emulation mode. Since the card emulation mode is compatible with the existing RFID standard, an RFID reader can recognize the presence of the NFC initiator device and allocates a slot for the P2P communications of the pairs of NFC devices. Performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol experiences less NFC delay than the legacy protocol.