Near ultrasonic close range communication for modern smartphones

Abstract: NFC is a technology that allows close-range communication between mobile devices. Unfortunately, not all modern smartphones have the required API’s or hardware to utilize it. This thesis seeks therefore to develop a viable alternative to NFC for close range communication (less than 10 cm) between mobile smart phones. The goal is to evaluate the feasibility of using a novel scheme that utilizes near ultrasonic frequencies for close range communication for both Android and iOS.An iPhone and an Android device were used to test our proposed scheme. Range test were preformed on a quiet and noisy environment (food court in a shopping mall), and an interference test was done in the quiet environment. The scheme was shown to work in the tested quiet and noisy environment for ranges less than 1 cm. In the noisy environment, significant data loss happened at 5 cm for the tested android device, while data was somewhat reliably received at up to 10 cm in a quiet environment among both tested devices. Our tests also show that concurrently communicating devices spaced at least 110 cm away will not interfere with each other.Our findings show that the proposed scheme could be a viable alternative for close range communication. By employing an error correcting code, tolerance to data loss could be improved. Using a different modulation technique is also advisable in order to improve the data transfer rate.For future work, we suggest testing the near ultrasonic capabilities of a wider array of devices in order to determine the usefulness of the proposed scheme.