Mobile phone + RFID technology = New mobile convergence toward ubiquitous computing environment

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is increasingly used to improve the efficiency of business processes by providing the capability of automatic identification and data capture and it is expected to extend its significant potential to daily life improvement. On the other hand, the convergence of the telecommunication, media and information technology industries has generated massive change in not just industries but also our daily lives, and none are more apparent than the mobile phone. Such convergence trend for mobile phone seems inevitable and the integration of RFID technology and mobile phone is regarded as one of promising technologies to accelerate such convergence trend toward the ubiquitous computing environment. In this paper, we discuss the benefits, business cases and system architectures emerging from the integration between RFID technology - especially, RFID reader - and mobile phone with existing wireless network infrastructure in terms of business and software perspectives. Moreover, we present the reference implementation for the RFID-based cellular network architecture incorporated with a mobile phone mounted with RFID reader in order to evaluate the technical feasibility of this convergence.