Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology that offers great and varied promise in services such as payment, ticketing, gaming, crowd sourcing, voting, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the integration of services from a wide range of applications into one single smartphone. NFC technology has emerged recently, and consequently not much academic data are available yet, although the number of academic research studies carried out in the past two years has already surpassed the total number of the prior works combined. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach from different perspectives, including hardware improvement and optimization, communication essentials and standards, applications, secure elements, privacy and security, usability analysis, and ecosystem and business issues. Further research opportunities in terms of the academic and business points of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each section. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians, as well as for business in the NFC technology and ecosystem.

Indoor navigation systems have recently become a popular research field due to the lack of GPS signals indoors. Several indoors navigation systems have already been proposed in order to eliminate deficiencies; however each of them has several technical and usability limitations. In this study, we propose NFC Internal, a Near Field Communication (NFC)-based indoor navigation system, which enables users to navigate through a building or a complex by enabling a simple location update, simply by touching NFC tags those are spread around and orient users to the destination. In this paper, we initially present the system requirements, give the design details and study the viability of NFC Internal with a prototype application and a case study. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of the system and compare it with existing indoor navigation systems. It is seen that NFC Internal has considerable advantages and significant contributions to existing indoor navigation systems in terms of security and privacy, cost, performance, robustness, complexity, user preference and commercial availability.

Existing indoor navigation systems face with many different technical and usability problems. In this paper we present a Near Field Communication (NFC) based indoor navigation system called NFC Internal in order to eliminate the current indoor navigation problems. NFC Internal enables an easy data transfer for indoor navigation systems just by touching tags spread over a building or a complex. The proposed system has several benefits and has potential to increase the usability of these systems. We discuss the system requirements and explain the phases of NFC Internal through use cases.

Near Field Communication (NFC), as an emerging and promising technology, is an integration of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology with mobile devices. NFC-enabled mobile devices can act as contactless smart cards and are also capable to read and write data from/to those cards. Research endeavours concerning NFC appear to focus mainly on development of NFC enabled services and applications. On the other hand, benefits and underlying values associated with different NFC applications' service is not yet well elaborated. In this paper we examined existing NFC applications, prototypes and studies from both academia and industry. We analyzed these applications by classifying them into NFC operating modes to surface the nature of underlying value-added services and benefits that they provide. Moreover we emphasized possible future usage scenarios together with directions and questions for future research based on the identified benefits.