The folks over at Microsoft Research might have stumbled upon something that is very, very interesting – that is, the ability to send files from one device to another using sound, calling this process the Secure Peer-to-Peer Acoustic NFC. Normally, NFC (Near Field Communication) would require the presence of a special chip to be placed within a mobile phone or tablet so that it can function, but considering how a huge number of smartphones out there do not come equipped with any kind of NFC hardware, the Microsoft Research’s India team decided to think of a different method in approaching this problem – by using a software solution instead.
The software will be called Dhwani, and once it is installed on a smartphone or mobile phone, you can basically use sound to transmit data over the speaker to another phone’s microphone. So far, the Dhwani software has been tested to transfer data at a rate of 2.4 kilobits per second. Painfully slow in this day and age, but it should be more than enough for a particular device to send payment to a store counter, or even to another handset. To avoid confusion, it will use JamSecure, where “the receiver intentionally jams the signal it is trying to receive, thereby stymieing eaves-droppers, but then uses self-interference cancellation to successfully decode the incoming message.”