Conference Proceedings

Pulse: low bitrate wireless magnetic communication for smartphones

Weiwei Jiang, Denzil Ferreira, Jani Ylioja, Jorge Goncalves, Vassilis Kostakos

Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) | Published : 2014

Abstract

We present Pulse, a wireless magnetic communication protocol for smartphones. Pulse is designed for off-the-shelf Android smartphones with magnetometers, and encodes data in magnetic fields. We present the design and evaluation of Pulse in various conditions (e.g., different voltages, number of transfer channels). The system provides security due to its short range (∼1 cm), it can reach a speed of up to 44 bits per second, and it is possible to run it on most mobile phones with a magnetometer. We present our evaluation and discuss practical use cases where Pulse can be used today.

University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants


Funding Acknowledgements

Funded by the Academy of Finland project 137736, TEKES project 2932/31/2009, and EU grant agreement PCIG11-GA-2012-322138. We thank Chen Yu for his insightful comments.