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-like 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
$10~cm$10cm
communication distance with average
110 bps
(bit per second) data rate on the normal-speed mode, and maximum
17.28 kbps
on the full-speed mode.