Abstract—Several new Android smartphones support Near
Field Communication (NFC). The Android SDK provides an
NFC API that can be used to develop NFC applications
that conduct peer-to-peer (P2P) data exchange. The Android
emulator does not support P2P communication between instances
of the Android Virtual Device (AVD). In addition to
this constraint, P2P experimentation on actual smartphones is
difficult due to limited NFC support. To fill the gap created
by this minimal support, we propose the JavaMail NFC
API (JNFC). JNFC uses the JavaMail API to emulate the
functionality of the Android NFC P2P API. To evaluate the
performance of JNFC, we created the DroidWSN Wireless
Sensor Network (WSN) model and implemented it as an
Android application. We design and conduct an experiment
for our DroidWSN model to measure the execution time of
our Android application WSN on AVDs. We compare our
simulation results against those from a similar experiment that
measured the execution time of a WSN composed of Sun SPOT
wireless devices. While the execution time of our DroidWSN
model is slower, we assert that our design is more simple and
flexible than that of our comparison study. We conclude that
this benefit and the factors of JNFC cost (it is open source),
the quality and quantity of Android smartphone sensors, and
imminent Android smartphone support for NFC P2P, combine
to make JNFC and the Android AVD a platform for NFC and
WSN research. Our study also emphasizes the need for Google
to create Android NFC P2P and sensor emulation APIs.