International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics An efficient technique to retrieve information from a damaged near-field communication tag Dawer Saeed Razi Iqbal Downloaded by American University in The Emirates, Doctor Razi Iqbal At 23:13 14 March 2017 (PT)
Article information: To cite this document: Dawer Saeed Razi Iqbal , (2017)," An efficient technique to retrieve information from a damaged near-field communication tag ", International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, Vol. 10 Iss 1 pp. 41 - 51 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/IJICC-08-2016-0028 Downloaded on: 14 March 2017, At: 23:13 (PT) References: this document contains references to 21 other documents. To copy this document:
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An efficient technique to retrieve information from a damaged near-field communication tag Downloaded by American University in The Emirates, Doctor Razi Iqbal At 23:13 14 March 2017 (PT)
Dawer Saeed Al-Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Lahore, Pakistan, and
Razi Iqbal College of Computer Information Technology, American University in the Emirates, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Efficient technique to retrieve information 41 Received 22 August 2016 Revised 2 October 2016 3 October 2016 Accepted 4 October 2016
Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss a technique of restoring data from a broken/damaged near-field communication (NFC) tag whose coil is damaged and seems unrecoverable. Design/methodology/approach – This paper discusses a method to restore data from damaged NFC tags by designing a coil that matches the technical specification of NFC for restoring information. In this paper, an NFC tag with a broken antenna coil and its operational NFC chip is used for restoring data by making an external loop antenna for the same chip. Findings – If the NFC tag is damaged, the information stored on the tag can be lost and can cause serious inconvenience. This research provides an excellent mechanism for retrieving all the information accurately from a damaged NFC tag provided the NFC chip is not damaged. Research limitations/implications – One of the major limitations of this research is that the NFC chip remains intact without any damages. Data can only be recoverable if just the antenna of the NFC tag is damaged; any damage to the NFC chip would make it impossible for the data to be recoverable. Practical implications – The research is carried out with limited resources in an academic institute and hence cannot be compared to antenna designs of the industry. Furthermore, industry vendors are using aluminum to design the coil; however, in this study a copper coil is used for coil design since it is far less expensive than aluminum coil. Originality/value – NFC is a rather new short-range wireless technology and not much work is done in this field as far as antenna study is concerned. This study brings a technique to design a coil antenna for a damaged NFC tag to retrieve all the information without losing even a single bit of sensitive information. Keywords Near-field communication, Radio frequency identification, Antenna design, Mutual inductance, Short-range wireless communication Paper type Technical paper
1. Introduction NFC is an acronym for near-field communication. NFC is used for communication within a short range of 10-20 cm. It is similar to RFID; however, one of the major differences between RFID and NFC is that NFC is a two-way communication technology and due to its low power consumption it can be easily incorporated in portable devices like smart phones and tablets. NFC uses two devices for its communication, one is the initiator and the other is the responder that responds to the initiator’s commands. When two NFC devices are brought closer, they start communicating with each other. NFC does not require pairing of devices unlike bluetooth where devices need pairing before communication. NFC is a tap and go technology where devices are instantly paired as soon as they are brought closer to each other. NFC has three modes of communication: peer-to-peer, card emulation and active-passive. In the peer-to-peer mode, both devices are active. Whenever they are brought closer to each other, they start communicating.
International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics Vol. 10 No. 1, 2017 pp. 41-51 © Emerald Publishing Limited 1756-378X DOI 10.1108/IJICC-08-2016-0028
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Figure 1. Two NFC-enabled smart phones communicating in P2P
Figure 2. NFC tag responding to an active device
This mode of communication is mostly used to transfer content from one device to the other. It requires no special pairing or authentication. Figure 1 illustrates the communication of two NFC-enabled smart phones in the peer-to-peer mode. In the card emulation mode, when an active device comes within the range of another active device, it acts like a passive device. This mode of communication is playing an important role in digital payments through smart phones or e-wallets. In the active-passive mode, the initiator is an active device and the responder is a passive device. When the active and passive devices are brought closer to each other, an induced EMF is generated in the passive device. As the required voltage to power the chip is generated in it, the chip starts responding to the initiator as illustrated in Figure 2. Passive tags are used in the active-passive mode, so this paper deals with only this mode. NFC is playing a vital role in various fields of life, e.g., transportation, healthcare, advertisement, retail and payment, etc. (Khari and Bajaj, 2014). NFC tags are used as passive devices for storing information. Due to their thinness and batteryless nature, they can be embedded in a very thin layer of paper (Iqbal, Ahmad and Gilani, 2014; Iqbal, Saeed and Ahmad, 2014). However, the small size and thinness of NFC tags increases the probability of damaging the tag and hence the loss of important data stored on the tag. NFC tag antenna can break if stress is applied to it beyond a certain limit. For example, an NFC based ticket sometimes comprises of a very thin card which is easily bendable, and if the stress applied to the card gets high enough to cross its bending limit, the antenna will immediately break and all the credit on the ticket will no longer be usable. Similar is the case with the NFC debit and credit cards. This paper discusses the possibility to retrieve data from a broken or damaged NFC tag by using its chip. This paper presents the design of a custom loop antenna compatible with NFC chip that can help retrieve the information from the tag even if its original antenna is completely broken. The core aim behind the proposed technique is to design a loop coil antenna for NFC that matches the specifications of NFC chip. The study presented in this paper assumes that NFC chip remains intact without any damages; however, if coil antenna is damaged, a new antenna can be designed to retrieve the information from the chip.
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Due to increase in the use of NFC for payments, damages to the tags can cause serious inconvenience since it can contain sensitive information. An extensive literature review showed that no such technique is currently available for retrieving sensitive information from NFC tags by designing a loop coil antenna based on NFC chip specifications. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the related work previously done in the area of NFC. Section 3 presents the proposed system model that lays the foundation. Section 4 explains the methodology which provides a complete description of steps taken to retrieve information from the tag. Section 5 highlights the experiments and their results obtained during the research. Section 6 concludes the work done during the study. 2. Related work NFC is an emerging technology which is gaining attention of many researchers worldwide. It is gaining popularity because of its diverse applications. This section explains the work related to NFC throughout the world followed by our contributions. A brief explanation about NFC is given in Want (2006), in which barcode and RFID are compared. The paper explains the two types of tags, namely, active and passive. Active tags require a power source for operations, e.g. a battery; however, passive tags do not require a battery as they are powered up by the initiator device through mutual induction. It further explains the near- and far-field tags and their power transmissions which are the basics of NFC. In another paper, Ortego et al. (2012) briefly analyze inkjet printed antennas in regard to the NFC technology. The paper mentions various factors involved in the fabrication process of a rectangular planer antenna such as size of the ink’s nanoparticles, substrate, and surface tension of the particle, time and temperature of the ink sintering, etc. Ylinen et al. (2009) explained the role of NFC as a network service. Various security aspects while transferring data through NFC are also discussed in this paper. A new gateway service protocol has been introduced. This NFC gateway service protocol provides service operators a convenient and flexible way to deliver and administer services for their customers. Assigning services to certain tags and certain customers is straightforward. A new concept of NFC-based wiki has been introduced by Siira et al. (2009). This locationbased wiki can be accessed by just touching the NFC tag with the device and it shows the details about that particular place by connecting with the wiki database. This idea presented the future prospects of the modern digital cities and information exchange. Ozdenizci et al. (2011) introduced a cheap and efficient indoor navigation system based on NFC. Various passive NFC tags are used to transmit the location data to the mobile phone which helps users navigate indoor. This system is comparatively cheap as low-cost passive tags are used in this case. Chi-Fang and Chun-Lun (2014) described the integration of NFC with a wireless charging system. For this purpose, they have integrated NFC antenna with the wireless charging coil. The users can charge their phone while transferring the data through NFC, like a wired USB charging and data transfer. The system proposed can even replace the need of wired chargers in future. Resatsch et al. (2007) introduced an idea of mobile sales assistant. Their idea is to develop an application that can check the status of consumer goods by using an NFC-enabled smartphone. The tags will be attached to different goods and whenever the mobile phone will be brought near these devices, the phone will read all the information from the tag and present it to the shop keeper. Juntunen et al. (2010) described the mobile payments through the NFC-enabled devices. It proposed a business model for the payments and ticketing. Similarly, Yaqub and Shaikh (2012)
Efficient technique to retrieve information 43
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described the usage of NFC technology for implementation in KSA to improve the systems. They have also done a comparison between NFC, RFID, IRDA and bluetooth to prove how NFC is better for daily life usage. Mujal et al. (2010) analyzed inkjet printers to print NFC antennas, and it is evident from the paper that the ink is still not much capable of the RFID requirements but it is able to print the NFC application antennas. NFC-based passive and semi-passive sensors are a new idea presented by Mika et al. (2009). This idea could revolutionize the world of “Internet of things.” With the growing number of NFC-enabled devices the NFC-based sensors would be more useful only when they are needed and one can easily read their value by just placing their devices onto them. Kim and Choi (2015) employed a rectangular patch to improve the communication range between the active and passive antenna of NFC. The design of their prototype antenna shows the increase in communication range from 100 mm to 110 mm and also gain in performance. Although the range of NFC was illustrated through their experiments, still the recovery of the data from its damaged coil was not shown. Lee et al. (2014) discussed the design and structure of NFC loop antenna for handsets. They proposed the use of ferrite-polymer composite with lower relative permeability to enhance the performance of NFC loop antenna. However, their study showed that this method is expensive and antennas are more prone to damages. Although they discussed the design of antenna with better performance, this paper lacks the recovery of data if the antenna is damaged. A lot of work is still being done on NFC. Although, most of the work done is still toward improving the performance of communication between the active and passive NFC tags and improving the communication range between the tag; however, not much work is done toward recovering the data from a damaged NFC tag. NFC tags are very sensitive and have a tendency to break through bending and once the antenna is broken, the information stored in the tag can be unrecoverable. For this purpose, we have worked on retrieving the data from a broken or damaged NFC tag that seems unrecoverable. We have experimented and developed a method to use the existing NFC chip with a new external coil to restore the data from it. 3. System model NFC tags, due to their ease of use and low cost, are rapidly gaining popularity. An NFC tag comprises of two parts, a chip and an antenna as shown in Figure 3. Antenna is larger in size as compared to the chip, but does not contain any data, since all the data are stored in the chip. The tag (antenna+chip) is manufactured by the vendors according to their own
NFC Chip Antenna
Figure 3. NFC chip and NFC antenna
NFC Tag
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parameters and materials. This paper presents a method for restoring data from a damaged NFC tag even if the spare antenna like previous tag is not available. For this purpose we have used a broken NFC tag which contains the NXP Semiconductors’ MIFARE Ultra-light MF0ICU chip. The original tag is etched using aluminum and the shape of the antenna is round. The original working tag is shown in Figure 3, and a broken tag is shown in Figure 4. Currently, there is no such technique documented which allows a user to recover the data in an inexpensive way. To retrieve the data, you will have to send the tag to a company that can read the memory bit by bit using some other invasive or non-invasive methods but those methods take much time, effort and lot of costly equipments to achieve the same task, and even then the accuracy and possibility of data being retrieved is not very high. On the other hand, using the technique mentioned in this paper, an engineer having basic knowledge of how to work with circuits can retrieve information from the damaged NFC tag. As mentioned earlier, NFC tags are used for storing some sensitive information like credit card information, passenger information and contact details, etc., which once lost might create serious inconvenience. Using the technique mentioned in this paper can help in retrieving this information. This paper discusses our implementation of a rectangular shaped micro-strip antenna etched on a PCB with copper metal, which is cheap and easily available in the market.
Efficient technique to retrieve information 45
4. Proposed system flow The overall workflow to recover data from broken tag is described in the chart in Figure 5. However, to verify all of this, we have not only relied on this, but we have also simulated the designed antenna to verify the claim in this paper. The results of simulations and the model and can be seen in the results and methodology section. 5. Methodology NFC works on the principle of mutual induction. Whenever a passive tag comes within the range of an active device an EMF is induced in the tag’s coil, which then powers the tag chip to run the rest of the circuitry to start communicating and transferring the data. This phenomenon makes an NFC antenna a mutually coupling coil. An NFC tag consists of two parts as mentioned earlier, since the chip it contains is very small compared to antenna, and normally the damage is caused to the antenna. In this study we are assuming that only antenna is damaged and the chip is operational. So, we will have to design and etch an antenna that can work with that specific chip. The tag antenna is actually a coil that acts as secondary in this process of mutual induction (Zecca et al., 2009). Inductance of mutually coupling coil is an important factor that should be highly considered in designing an NFC tag. It is necessary to know the type and input capacitor of the NFC tag chip. The value is Damages
NFC chip Figure 4. Damaged NFC tag containing data
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Broken NFC tag antenna with sensitive information
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Use inductance formula to calculate Inductance
Coil a wire with calculated Inductance
Attach chip terminals to antenna terminals
Figure 5. Process flow chart for NFC broken tag data retrieval
The chip can be read using any reader and the lost data can be retrieved
Finish
usually provided by the manufacturer in the datasheet. In our case, the typical value is “50 pF” (NXP Semiconductors, 2014). Since the standard working frequency of NFC is already known (13.56 MHz), we can use the following formula for the calculation of inductance for the given capacitance and frequency (STMicroelectronics, 2009): Lant ¼
1 ð2pf 0 Þ2 UC turn
(1)
where Lant is the required inductance of the coil, Cturn the capacitance of the input capacitor and f0 the desired working frequency. The choice of this particular frequency is because of the NFC standard and the datasheet of tag clearly mentions that the typical operating frequency is 13.56 MHz (NXP Semiconductors, 2014). The equation has been derived from the formula of resonant frequency of a parallel resonant LC circuit which is as follows: f0 ¼
1 pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi 2p Lant UC turn
(2)
Using the above-mentioned formulas, inductance Lant appears to be 2.7 µH. Using this value, an antenna or a coil can be designed in any shape that will theoretically work efficiently with that particular chip. The inductance of any coil can easily be calculated through the inductance measuring formulas for desired shapes like square, rectangular, hexagonal or octagonal, etc. Several tools are also available. Mohan et al. (1999) provided small expressions to calculate the inductance of a coil with different shapes. For the purpose of this study, we used a lightweight tool “Antenne” (STMicroelectronics, 2009). Some of the similar tools have also been used by Kisic et al. (2013) in their paper which can be used to compute the inductance of the antenna. Table I illustrates some shape parameters used for designing a rectangular shaped coil. The number of turns have been changed to get the nearest possible inductance value as calculated using Equation (1). The change in inductance with the change in shape
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parameters has also been described by Iqbal, Ahmad and Gilani (2014) and Iqbal, Saeed and Ahmad (2014). Coil with the same inductance can be made by changing other parameters as well but keeping the convenience and size into account the mentioned parameters have been selected and only the number of turns have been changed. Various simulations have been performed using CST Microwave Studio to justify our design using the above-mentioned shape parameters. Our designed model for the coil is shown in Figure 6. The model has exactly the same parameters as were used to calculate the inductance. The coil material used for designing and etching the antenna is pure copper and the substrate is FR-4 lossy type. The reason to use these materials is that they are cheap and readily available in the market. Several simulations have been performed to gauge the efficiency of the designed antenna. The simulated S11 parameters’ graph is shown in Figure 7. The graph clearly shows that the designed coil is capable of absorbing multiple frequencies along with absorbing the desired frequency (13.56 MHz). So the operational frequency setting depends only on the matching network. The energy absorbed can be made specific in a specific range of frequency by implementing a desired matching circuitry. After implementing the matching circuitry our antenna with the desired inductance will be
Parameters
Efficient technique to retrieve information 47
Values 40 × 24 0.55 0.3 6 1.98
Dimensions (mm) Trace width (mm) Spacing (mm) No. of turns (mm) Inductance ( µH)
7 2.15
8 2.66
9 2.94
10 3.06
Table I. Shape parameters for designing a coil
Figure 6. CST model of antenna according to the desired parameters
S-Parameter (Magnitude in dB) 0 S1,1
1
–0.02 –0.04 –0.06 –0.08 –0.1 –0.12 –0.14 1
(13.56, –0.028149)
12
13
14
15
16
Frequency/MHz
17
18
19
20
Figure 7. S-11 parameters’ graph shows the absorption of the multiple frequencies including 13.56 MHz
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able to absorb the desired frequency. The chip already has an internal frequency matching circuitry that allows the antenna to absorb only a specific range of frequencies while rejecting the other frequencies. For this purpose only the chip along with some of its traces has been separated from the original damaged antenna as shown in Figure 8. From these traces, two connections are made to the antenna. Figure 8 illustrates the connections made to the chip with an antenna. The antenna has been etched on a PCB of copper using the traditional chemical etching. Figure 9 shows the customized NFC tag antenna and the chip from the previously damaged tag which is now ready to transmit data to any active NFC device. This newly made tag is now able to transmit data whenever it is held within the range of an initiator. The aim of the paper is to design a coil for the damaged tag and retrieve information from it. As a first step, the coil is designed based on the parameters specified in Table I as explained earlier. The second step is to retrieve the information from the tag. For this purpose, an android app is used for NFC-enabled android devices to read the raw data from tag. 6. Results and discussions The simulated antenna’s electric field map can be shown in Figure 10. The figure clearly shows the result that the designed antenna will be able to communicate with the other antenna if brought into the range of the coil. Several such simulations were performed to ensure the proper communication of NFC tags with active antenna. Furthermore, these simulation and experiment results showed the communication range of NFC was not compromised and data were successfully read within the range of 10 mm, 5 mm and at the touching distance. Connection
Chip
Figure 8. NFC tag chip with some traces to make a connection with custom antenna
Trace
Tag Chip
Figure 9. New NFC tag to recover data
Customized Tag Antenna
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As illustrated in Table II, the redesigned antenna performed well for several experiments conducted to gauge the efficiency of communication range. Three different distances were used for performing these experiments, 10 mm, 5 mm and the touching distance. Various trails were done (ten tries for this experiment for each distance) and communication was excellent at the touching distance and the 5 mm distance. However, at 10 mm the success rate was 90 percent which is still good but considered as a limitation of this research, since antenna is designed with limited resources at an academic institute. However, if this technique is used with accuracy and precision, 100 percent results can be obtained for the 10 mm communication range as well. In order to perform experiments, dummy data are written to the tag which is expected to be retrieved even after the coil is damaged. After attaching the external customized coil or antenna with the chip, it can easily be read by the initiator and the data can be successfully retrieved. The tag is brought closer to the NFC-enabled android devices and the app reads all the information from the tag as shown in Figure 11. Figure 11(a) and (b) shows the comparison of the retrieved data after the chip is restored and the original data from the chip before it was even damaged. It is evident from the results that no data change has occurred even after replacing the antenna with the chip. Even the header bits of the NFC protocol (evident from memory locations “00” to “03”) have not been changed. Moreover, even the tag ID remains unchanged. 7. Conclusion This paper presents a method to retrieve the data from a damaged NFC tag which seems unrepairable. The retrieval of data can even be done if similar antenna is not available. For this purpose, the customized external coil is designed and NFC chip is attached to it. In order to design the customized antenna, the parameters of the chip should be considered properly; otherwise, the tag might not be able to transmit data properly. Several simulations were performed to test the antenna and the results were encouraging which makes us conclude that the data retrieval from a broken/damaged NFC tag is possible and can be achieved without any data loss if chip is operational. The design of customized NFC tag is possible even with different shape and substrate material, keeping into account the inductance of the coil.
Distance Touch 5 mm 10 mm
No. of trails
Success rate (%)
10 10 10
100 100 90
Table II. Communication range of the redesigned NFC coil antenna
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(a)
(b)
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Figure 11. Evidence of NFC data retrieval
Notes: (a) NFC tag data before damage; (b) NFC tag data after retrieval References Chi-Fang, H. and Chun-Lun, L. (2014), “Design of antennas and circuit for integrating RFID and wireless charging systems”, 8th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation: IEEE, The Hague and New York, NY, April 6-11, pp. 1580-1581. Iqbal, R., Ahmad, A. and Gilani, A. (2014), “NFC based inventory control system for secure and efficient communication”, Computer Engineering and Applications, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 23-33. Iqbal, R., Saeed, D. and Ahmad, A. (2014), “Wearable near field communication ring antenna for mobile communication”, International Conference on Open Source Systems and Technologies: IEEE, Lahore and New York, NY, December 18-20, pp. 146-150. Juntunen, A., Luukkainen, S. and Tuunainen, V. (2010), “Deploying NFC technology for mobile ticketing services – identification of critical business model issues”, Ninth International Conference on Mobile Business and Global Mobility Roundtable: IEEE, Athens and New York, NY, June 13-15, pp. 82-90. Khari, M. and Bajaj, C. (2014), “Near field communication technology benefitted for metro rides”, International Journals of Advanced Engineering and Global Technology, Vol. 10 No. 7, pp. 828-838. Kim, W. and Choi, S. (2015), “A novel internal NFC/FM antenna with parasitic-patch-enhanced NFC interrogation range and FM passive gain”, PIER C, Vol. 57, pp. 81-87. Kisic, M., Dakic, B., Damnjanovic, M., Menicanin, A., Blaz, N. and Zivanov, L. (2013), “Design and simulation of 13.56 MHz RFID tag in ink-jet printing technology”, 36th International Spring Seminar on Electronics Technology: IEEE, Alba Lulia and New York, NY, May 8-12, pp. 263-267. Lee, B., Kim, B. and Yang, S. (2014), “Enhanced loop structure of NFC antenna for mobile handset applications”, International Journal of Antennas and Propagation, Vol. 2014 No. 2014, pp. 1-6. Mika, H., Mikko, H. and Arto, Y. (2009), “Practical implementations of passive and semi-passive NFC enabled sensors”, First International Conference on Near Field Communication: IEEE, Hagenberg im Mühlkreis and New York, NY, February 24, pp. 56-60. Mohan, S., Hershenson, M., Boyd, S. and Lee, T. (1999), “Simple accurate expressions for planar spiral inductances”, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 34 No. 10, pp. 1419-1424.
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Mujal, J., Ramon, E., Di, E., Carrabina, J., Calleja, A., Marti, R. and Teres, L. (2010), “Inkjet printed antennas for NFC systems”, 17th IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems: IEEE, Athens and New York, NY, December 12-15, pp. 1220-1223. Ortego, I., Sanchez, N., Garcia, J., Casado, F., Valderas, D. and Sancho, J. (2012), “Inkjet printed planar coil antenna analysis for NFC technology applications”, International Journal of Antennas and Propagation, Vol. 2012 No. 2012, pp. 1-6. Ozdenizci, B., Kerem, O., Coskun, V. and Aydin, M. (2011), “Development of an indoor navigation system using NFC technology”, Fourth International Conference on Information and Computing: IEEE, Phuket and New York, NY, April 25-27, pp. 11-14. Resatsch, F., Karpischek, S., Sandner, U. and Hamacher, S. (2007), “Mobile sales assistant: NFC for retailers”, 9th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services: ACM, New York, NY, September 11-14, pp. 313-316. Siira, E., Tuikka, T. and Tormanen, V. (2009), “Location-based mobile wiki using NFC tag infrastructure”, First International Conference on Near Field Communication: IEEE, Hagenberg and New York, NY, February 24, pp. 56-60. Want, R. (2006), “An introduction to RFID technology”, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 5, pp. 25-33. STMicroelectronics (2009), “How to design a 13.56 MHz customized tag antenna”, AN2866 Application note STMicroelectronics, January, pp. 1-24. NXP Semiconductors (2014), “MIFARE Ultralight contactless single-ticket IC”, MF0ICU1 Product data sheet Rev. 3.9 NXP Semiconductors, July, pp. 1-31. Yaqub, M. and Shaikh, U. (2012), “Near field communication, its application and implementation in KSA”, MSc, King Fahad University of Petrolum and Minerals, Dhahran. Ylinen, J., Koskela, M., Iso-Anttila, L. and Loula, P. (2009), “Near field communication network services”, Third International Conference on Digital Society; Cancun, February 1-7, pp. 89-93. Zecca, G., Couderc, P., Banâtre, M. and Beraldi, R. (2009), “A swarm of robots using RFID tags for synchronization and cooperation”, International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 846-869. About the authors Dawer Saeed completed his Bachelors in Mechatronics and Control Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore in 2012. After completing his bachelors he started working for Khawaja Electronics Pvt. Limited as Production Engineer and then he switched to Pakistan Cycle Industrial Co-operative society as Assistant Manager Production in June 2013. He is now working as a Research Officer at Al-Khwarizmi Institute of Computer Science, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan since August 2014. His current research areas include, wearable computing, Near-Field Communication and Robotics. Dr Razi Iqbal is the Program Director of Computer Science at the College of Computer Information Technology, American University in the Emirates. Dr Razi earned his PhD and Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Akita University in Akita, Japan. He has published several papers in the areas of Computer Science and Engineering, specifically in computer networks, wireless technologies and wearable computing. His current research areas are use of short range wireless technologies in precision agriculture, transportation and education.
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