OPEN-SNEP project: Enabling P2P over NFC using NPP and SNEP

Near Field Communication's functionality is divided into three different modes: Reader/Writer, Card Emulation and Peer-To-Peer. Starting with the beginning of 2011, the Samsung Nexus S, equipped with Android 2.3, offered some basic support to the NFC Peer-To-Peer protocol and many different research groups started working on that. This paper analyses the various Peer-to-Peer protocols, with particular emphasis on NPP (the protocol designed and developed by Google and available only on Android devices) and SNEP (the standard specification of the NFC Forum for Peer-to-Peer and, at time of writing, already available on Android, RIM and Microsoft Windows 8 devices), and presents OPEN-SNEP library, an open source solution able to implement the Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol, in order to establish a half-duplex bi-directional communication link between an NFC capable device and an NFC reader. In this paper the technical details of the OPEN-SNEP solution and the main differences between the two protocols from a developer point of view are analysed together with two use cases.