A-NFC: Two-way near-field communications (NFC) via inaudible acoustics

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a technology for wireless short-range communication. The main attribute of NFC is proximity and that data transmission will take place only within a very small area. However, NFC-based applications are still not prevalent due to slow progress of NFC hardware penetration. In this paper, we present A-NFC, an NFC-like communication system, which operates on existing mobile phones. It is an inaudible acoustics-based system utilizing the microphones and speakers on mobile phones. In addition, A-NFC is purely software based and can run on different operating systems. A-NFC implements full-duplex two-way communication by designing two independent channels in the inaudible frequency band. To the best of our knowledge, A-NFC is the first acoustics communication system capable of inaudible and two-way communications on various popular platforms (Android and iOS included). Extensive experiments demonstrate that A-NFC can reliably provide NFC capability with a data rate up to 2.2 Kbps on various devices.