Wireless sensor networks using Android Virtual Devices and Near Field Communication peer-to-peer emulation

Several new Android smartphones support Near Field Communication (NFC). The Android SDK provides an NFC API that can be used to develop NFC applications that conduct peer-to-peer (P2P) data exchange. The Android emulator does not support P2P communication between instances of the Android Virtual Device (AVD). In addition to this constraint, P2P experimentation on actual smartphones is difficult due to limited NFC support. To fill the gap created by this minimal support, we propose the JavaMail NFC API (JNFC). JNFC uses the JavaMail API to emulate the functionality of the Android NFC P2P API. To evaluate the performance of JNFC, we created the DroidWSN Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) model and implemented it as an Android application. We design and conduct an experiment for our DroidWSN model to measure the execution time of our Android application WSN on AVDs. We compare our simulation results against those from a similar experiment that measured the execution time of a WSN composed of Sun SPOT wireless devices. While the execution time of our DroidWSN model is slower, we assert that our design is more simple and flexible than that of our comparison study. We conclude that this benefit and the factors of JNFC cost (it is open source), the quality and quantity of Android smartphone sensors, and imminent Android smartphone support for NFC P2P, combine to make JNFC and the Android AVD a platform for NFC and WSN research. Our study also emphasizes the need for Google to create Android NFC P2P and sensor emulation APIs.