MagneComm: Magnetometer-based Near-Field Communication

Near-field communication (NFC) plays a crucial role in the operation of mobile devices to enhance applications such as payment, social networks, private communication, gaming, and etc. Despite of the convenience, existing NFC standards like ISO-13157 require additional hardware (e.g., loop antenna and dedicated chip) and thereby hindering their wide-scale applications. In this work, we seek to propose a novel near-field communication protocol, MagneComm, which utilizes Magnetic Induction (MI) signals emitted from CPUs and captured by magnetometers on mobile devices for communication. Since CPUs and magnetometers are readily available components in mobile devices, MagneComm eliminates the requirement for special hardware and complements existing near-field communication protocols by providing additional bandwidth. We systematically analyze the characteristics of magnetic signals of CPUs and facilitate MagneComm with one-way communication, full-duplex communication, and multi-transmitter schemes in accordance with the hardware availability on devices. We prototype MagneComm on both laptops and smartphones. Extensive evaluation results show that MagneComm achieves up to 110 bps within 10 cm.

In The 23th Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking