AbstractThe Near Field Communication (NFC) standard is based on the radio‐frequency identification (RFID) standard. Because NFC and High Frequency RFID share the same frequency band, an NFC device cannot operate normally when they coexist. In this letter, we propose a fast identification protocol for the coexistence of NFC and RFID systems. When an RFID reader identifies an NFC device in the tag mode, the RFID reader stops identifying RFID tags and reserves the next slot for the NFC device in the proposed scheme. The NFC device changes its mode to the reader mode and identifies an RFID tag nearby at the allocated slot. We show that the NFC identification delay is reduced by our proposed scheme via analysis and simulations. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.