Architecture and evaluation of a user-centric NFC-enabled ticketing system for small events

Small events are events with a limited number of attendees and limited financial means for the organizers. They represent an uncovered niche in the e-ticketing field. Our contribution, which is mainly practical, consists in proposing a solution to address this issue. We introduce an offline approach that uses Near Field Communication-enabled (NFC-enabled) mobile phones in a e-ticketing system dedicated to the management of these small events. In other words, we present an architecture which does not make use of an Internet connection during the ticket validation phase and that requires no infrastructure. Based on this architecture, we evaluate a prototype that we developed in terms of user experience, security, economical aspects and speed of use in order to show its relevance. Starting from a scenario with four use cases, we focus on the ticket issuance and the ticket presentation phase