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MagneComm: Magnetometer-based Near-Field Communication

Published: 04 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Near-field communication (NFC) plays a crucial role in the operation of mobile devices to enhance applications such as payment, social networks, private communication, gaming, and etc. Despite of the convenience, existing NFC standards like ISO-13157 require additional hardware (e.g., loop antenna and dedicated chip) and thereby hindering their wide-scale applications. In this work, we seek to propose a novel near-field communication protocol, MagneComm, which utilizes Magnetic Induction (MI) signals emitted from CPUs and captured by magnetometers on mobile devices for communication. Since CPUs and magnetometers are readily available components in mobile devices, MagneComm eliminates the requirement for special hardware and complements existing near-field communication protocols by providing additional bandwidth. We systematically analyze the characteristics of magnetic signals of CPUs and facilitate MagneComm with one-way communication, full-duplex communication, and multi-transmitter schemes in accordance with the hardware availability on devices. We prototype MagneComm on both laptops and smartphones. Extensive evaluation results show that MagneComm achieves up to 110bps within 10cm.

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  • (2025)MagSpy: Revealing User Privacy Leakage via Magnetometer on Mobile DevicesIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.349550624:3(2455-2469)Online publication date: Mar-2025
  • (2024)Enable Touch-based Communication between Laptop and SmartwatchCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677574(4-8)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Towards ISAC-Empowered mmWave Radars by Capturing Modulated VibrationsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.344340423:12(13787-13803)Online publication date: Dec-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
MobiCom '17: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
October 2017
628 pages
ISBN:9781450349161
DOI:10.1145/3117811
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 04 October 2017

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Author Tags

  1. full-duplex
  2. magnetic induction
  3. near-field communication

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • NSFC
  • Shanghai Talent Development Fund
  • Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities

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MobiCom '17
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MobiCom '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 35 of 186 submissions, 19%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 440 of 2,972 submissions, 15%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)MagSpy: Revealing User Privacy Leakage via Magnetometer on Mobile DevicesIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.349550624:3(2455-2469)Online publication date: Mar-2025
  • (2024)Enable Touch-based Communication between Laptop and SmartwatchCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677574(4-8)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Towards ISAC-Empowered mmWave Radars by Capturing Modulated VibrationsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.344340423:12(13787-13803)Online publication date: Dec-2024
  • (2024)Harnessing NFC to Generate Standard Optical Barcodes for NFC-Missing SmartphonesIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.342041023:12(12952-12968)Online publication date: Dec-2024
  • (2024)Extracting Payment Tokens Out of Sounds Produced by Magnetic Field FluctuationsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.335926623:9(8803-8821)Online publication date: Sep-2024
  • (2024)MagView++: Data Exfiltration via CPU Magnetic Signals Under Video DecodingIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.326240023:3(2486-2503)Online publication date: Mar-2024
  • (2023)ProxiFitProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36109207:3(1-32)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Demonstrating ProxiFit: Proximal Magnetic Sensing using a Single Commodity Mobile toward Holistic Weight Exercise MonitoringAdjunct Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing & the 2023 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computing10.1145/3594739.3610710(151-156)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2023
  • (2023)MagneComm+: Near-Field Electromagnetic Induction Communication With MagnetometerIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2021.313348122:5(2789-2801)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
  • (2023)LeakThief: Stealing the Behavior Information of Laptop via Leakage Current2023 20th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON)10.1109/SECON58729.2023.10287495(186-194)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
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