NFC plus : NFC-assisted Media Sharing for Mobile Devices

This paper presents NFC+, a new approach to ubiquitous mobile media sharing. Data can be instantaneously shared in a fast and secure way between users without the presence of Internet. It uses NFC, which has fast setup time but low bandwidth, to exchange both network settings and the media URI, then programmatically configures wireless interfaces to securely connect and transfer the media. Specifically, we propose NFC+Hotspot, which combines NFC with secure Wi-Fi Hotspot mode. It is secure, easy to use, and significantly faster than existing sharing methods. We evaluated various sharing methods, in 2 categories, for photo and video: 1. Direct Transfer (e.g. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Hotspot), and 2. NFC+ Direct Transfer. Experimental results show that our NFC+Hotspot approach has the fastest photo and video sharing performance, with improvement ranging from 1.8x-3.7x for 1MB photo and 0.7x - 6.9x for 1 minute HD video compared to (non-NFC+) Direct Transfer methods.