NFC based inventory control system for secure and efficient communication

TL;DR

This paper proposes an NFC-based inventory control system replacing traditional barcodes, emphasizing enhanced security, reliability, and efficiency for product management and checkout processes.

Contribution

The paper introduces a prototype NFC inventory system demonstrating improved security and reliability over barcodes for product tracking and checkout.

Findings

NFC tags provide higher security than barcodes.

The prototype enables quick, secure receipt generation using NFC.

NFC system is more reliable for various product shapes and conditions.

Abstract

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.