NFC based inventory control system for secure and efficient communication
This addresses inventory management inefficiencies for retail businesses, but it is incremental as it applies existing NFC technology to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of insecure and unreliable barcode-based inventory control by proposing an NFC-based system, resulting in a prototype for an electronic store that uses passive NFC tags on products to generate receipts via short-range communication.
This paper brings up this idea of using Near Field Communication (NFC) for inventory control system instead of using traditional barcodes. NFC because of its high security, ease of use and efficiency can be very suitable for systems like inventory control. In traditional inventory control systems, each product has a barcode pasted on it, which is vulnerable to attacks as barcodes are open and have no security. Furthermore, barcodes are prone to damages and can be unreliable when pasted on different types of products e.g. hot and frozen products, circular shaped products and irregular shaped products like clothes etc. NFC on the other hand is very efficient, secure and reliable when it comes to short-range wireless communication. In this paper we will present our prototype for the inventory control system of an electronic store in which each product has a passive NFC tag pasted to it. When a customer buys a product the receipt of the product is generated using NFC between the NFC passive tag on the product and NFC enabled device (e.g. smart phone or reader) at the cash counter.