DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A QUICK RESPONSE (QR) CODE WITH SCANNER APPLICATION FOR MOBILE NETWORK RECHARGE OPERATIONS

By

Author

Presented To

Department of Computer Engineering

ABSTRACT

Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) permit subscribers to gain access to the data, voice calls as well as short messaging services (SMS). One of the frequent ways of using any of these mobile network services is through the acquisition of recharge vouchers. However, illegal access to the recharge codes/digits has not been totally eradicated and this has drastically affected the use of recharge vouchers. This project examined and demonstrated the feasibility of employing Quick Response (QR) code as a more secured airtime pattern in order to reduce the tedious process of recharging our mobile lines with the manual recharge vouchers of entering the 16 digits number. It also presented a model of mobile recharge solutions using the QR Code as the communication link, enabling encryption of recharge transaction details using python and HTML programming language. In order to achieve this, a standalone application was developed to implement the QR Code. The CSS was used to develop the mobile scan application for scanning the QR Code, using android studio as IDE, javascript and python were used to simplify the client-side scripting. The system developed is a new android mobile wallet application which was developed using the apache web server and personal android phone as the testing machine. To ascertain the accuracy and performance measure of the developed system, a comparative analysis of the developed system against the existing airtime recharging methods was done, and the developed system yielded a timely result. Also our experimental result shows that the new system has better security features as it deploys dual authentication.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page i

Declaration ii

Certification iii

Dedication iv

Acknowledgements v

Table of Contents vi

List of Tables viii

List of Figures ix

Abstract x

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION1

1.1 Background Study 1

1.2 Statement of the Problem 5

1.3 Aim and Objectives 5

1.4 Justification of the Study 6

1.5 Scope 7

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 9

2.1 Related Works on QR Codes with the Use of Android/Smart Phones 9

2.2 Existing Mobile Recharge System Model 13

2.3 Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) Pricing Models 16

2.4 Existing Recharge Voucher Generation Method 18

2.5 Guides on How to Generate QR Codes 22

2.6 QR Code Readers 24

2.7 Encoding Procedure Overview 25

2.8Decoding Procedure Overview 26

2.9 Literature Gap 28

CHAPTER 3: MATERIALS AND METHODS 30

3.1 Materials 30

3.1.1 Software requirements 30

3.1.2 Hardware requirements 31

3.1.3 Human resource requirements 31

3.2 Data Collection 31

3.2.1 Primary data 32

3.2.2 Secondary data 32

3.3 Feasibility Study 33

3.3.1 Aspects of the feasibility study considered 34

3.4 Choice of Model Used 34

3.4.1 Waterfall model 35

3.5 Accessing a QR Code on a Mobile Phone 36

3.6 Analysis of the New Designed System 38

3.7 System Design of the New Proposed System 39

3.8 The Programming Language Used 40

3.9 Database Management System for the New Designed System 41

3.10 Input Design Form for the New Designed System 42

3.10.1 Description of the new system interfaces 42

3.11 Software Installation/Code Generation Process 48

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION50

4.1 Results 50

4.2 Discussions 51

4.3 How QR Codes are Created and Decoded by the Mobile Network Users 52

4.3.1 Creating a QR code 52

4.3.2 Scanning a QR code 54

4.3.3 Results of the QR code generation 55

4.3.4 Reading the QR code recharge voucher 55

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS60

5.1Conclusion 60

5.2 Recommendation 61

5.3 Contribution to Knowledge 61

References

Appendices

LIST OF TABLES

Page

2.1: Some related literature review and their limitations 13

3.1: The software’s and their specifications 30

3.2: Sample of questionnaire 33

4.1 Speed/scanning time process of the QR codes using mobile scan

application 50

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

1.1: Sample of a QR code 4

2.1: Flowchart of the existing manual system 15

2.2: Existing recharge vouchers 18

2.3: Existing recharge voucher printing stand-alone user interface19<