MagneComm+: Near-Field Electromagnetic Induction Communication with Magnetometer

Near-field communication (NFC) technology emerges as a vital role with appealing benefits for users to improve mobile device’s functionality. Although today’s most smartphones and smartwatches come with NFC support, other mobile devices (e.g., PC and laptops) and IoT devices that don’t equip with dedicated radio modules cannot take advantage of wide-scale NFC capability. We design and develop MagneComm+, an NFC implementation scheme without dedicated hardware and propose a novel near-field communication protocol that is applicable to almost all mobile devices and IoT devices. The key idea is to utilize the electromagnetic induction (EMI) signal emitted from the computing devices (e.g., CPUs) and captured by magnetometers on mobile devices for communication. We tackle challenges in data encoding/decoding, preamble detection, retransmission and error correction, multi-transmitter, and full-duplex schemes, to efficiently generate and reliably receive EMI signal with the hardware available on devices. We prototype MagneComm+ on both between laptops and smartphones, as well as between two laptops with an external magnetometer. Extensive evaluation results show that our MagneComm+ supports around 10cm communication distance with average 110 bit per second (bps) data rate on the normal-speed mode, and maximum 17.28kbps on the full-speed mode.

In Transactions on Mobile Computing