An NFC ticketing system with a new approach of an inverse reader mode

This paper presents a new approach for ticketing systems using NFC smartphones. Current systems use NFC enabled mobile phones either in card emulation or peer-to-peer mode for exchanging data and for validating tickets for instance. In practice these systems face different barriers regarding realization and interoperability from developers and operators perspective, which prevents them to be widely rolled out. In this paper we propose a solution, where the mobile phone is in reader/writer mode and the ticketing system is in card emulation mode. The major advantage for this inverse scenario is that it can be implemented very easily by using light-weight protocols, which are compatible to existing mobile phones. This paper provides an overview about the major problems, discusses advantages and disadvantages of the new approach, and finally describes an implementation from a proof of concept realization.