A role-based service level NFC ecosystem model

Abstract

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short range wireless communication technology allowing to communicate mobile devices within close proximity. It provides opportunity for service providers to offer various value added services to customers. NFC technology allows the usage of wide range of applications and eliminates the obligation to carry additional components other than the mobile device such as credit or payment cards, tickets, identification cards or keys. Despite its technological advantages over alternative ones, the NFC business ecosystems and services are yet to take off. The problems mainly arise with the business issues triggered by different and mostly conflicting needs of many actors in the ecosystem and several additional technical issues. In this study, by adopting a role-based service ecosystem modeling, we propose an NFC ecosystem model which perfectly specifies the roles in the ecosystem, and defines set of activities for each role, and communication structure. We analyzed NFC ecosystem in three phases as pre-installation, installation, and service usage. We have defined the activities and communication structure in the first two phases, and finally investigated the service usage phase in three different operating modes of NFC. After giving the details of the proposed ecosystem model, two use cases are given to validate the developed ecosystem model. We complete our study by discussing the requirement satisfaction.