Radio Frequency Near Communication (RFNC) Technology: An Integrated RFID-NFC System for Objects' Localization

Abstract

The recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) has promoted for finding or localizing objects with different technologies. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in indoor localization applications due to its ease of deployment and low cost. With passive RFID tags, an object can be localized within less than 10cm. However, passive RFID localization systems cannot provide easy localization due to its limited reading range. Using Active RFID tags will provide longer localization range to a lost object. However, while pairing the mobile phone with the tag, the phone may capture any tag in its reading range; thus, the tag pairing process may be done improperly. Alternatively, Near Field Communication (NFC) has been proposed as an extension to the RFID technology in which the reader must be within close proximity to the NFC tag for achieving the reading task. With the deployment of NFC, several mobile phone applications have been developed employing NFC in payments and contactless systems. However, due to the short localization range of NFC, it becomes extremely difficult to find a lost item. Currently, RFID and NFC have been employed in object localization systems separately. Alternatively, in this paper we propose Radio Frequency Near Communication (RFNC) is an integrated RFID- NFC system for localization of lost item. Our experiments integrating RFID and NFC technologies confirm that NFC technology can be a complement to the RFID technology rather than an alternative.