Android Based Toolset for NFC Tag Testing and Performance Evaluation

Abstract:
Currently, there is not sufficient published data about the performance and energy efficiency of NFC as experienced by NFC applications and there does not exist proper tools for NFC application developers to efficiently benchmark and test tags. Therefore, we developed an open source Android based toolset for NFC tag testing and performance evaluation. The toolset is designed in such a way that it is extensible with respect to supported tags and supported benchmarking routines. The architecture of the toolset comprises a basic library that provides a single interface for communication with a range of NFC tags, one app for benchmarking, and one app to test proprietary communications protocols. To confirm that the apps fulfill their purpose, extensive testing is performed to compare five tags based on five different standards. The benchmark results reveal that the communication performance between the NFC reader and the tag is not significantly influenced by an increasing distance between them in the range of zero to 30mm, not even when a body of saline solution separates them. One unexpected result is the measured energy consumption for powering the tag, which is about 30% higher than that for writing to the tag. We can also conclude from the results that throughput of the communication between tag and smartphone is the most important factor for energy efficiency.