Enabling mobile commerce through pervasive communications with ubiquitous RF tags

Abstract

For many years we've heard of the existence of a wonderful new technology called radio frequency identification (RFID) that allows supermarket items to be checked out without human intervention. Advertisements claim that this technology will be able to locate our keys and spectacles when we lose them around the house - all for pennies. Although technologists amongst us widely recognize this as very early marketing hype, we also admit to having recently witnessed strong evidence that underlying RFID tag performance and cost are fast approaching these initially very optimistic expectations. The future success of mobile commerce or m-commerce will depend on a pervasive communications infrastructure that provides both seamless roaming and automatic object identification. In this paper, we identify key factors that will enable future pervasive deployment of RFID tag and communications technology, thereby leading to the acceleration of applications for m-commerce. For each of these factors, we provide a summary of the existing impediments and propose potential solutions.