Engineers forced WiFi to work, consuming 10,000 times less energy

Engineers from the University of Washington demonstrated the Passive Wi-Fi system, which is able to exchange information using wireless technology, spending 10,000 times less energy than conventional devices. The system is also 1000 times more efficient than modern low-power chips, such as Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee.

The technology will be presented in detail at the 13th USENIX Symposium on Networks and Network Devices. It is already named among the 10 breakthroughs of 2016 by the publication of the MIT Technology Review .
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“We wanted to find out if it is possible to achieve WiFi transmission without consuming any energy,” explains Shyam Gollakota, an assistant professor at the university. - This is exactly what Passive Wi-Fi achieves. It consumes 10,000 times less than the most energy efficient device available. ”

The technology is able to work at a speed of 11 mbps, which is, of course, less than the maximum WiFi speed, but at least more than Bluetooth. It can not only significantly increase the precious battery life of smartphones and other mobile devices, but also significantly bring the era of the Internet of things closer.



Such savings are achieved by separating the digital and analog modules necessary for processing WiFi signals. The energy-efficient digital module remains on the device, and the analog module is used alone for the entire network, and is plugged into an outlet. A set of sensors of a digital module sends information, simply reflecting and absorbing the signal from the analog. When testing, it was found that a set of WiFi sensors can work with a smartphone at a distance of about 100 m.

“All networking and other energy-intensive activities are carried out by a single device plugged into an outlet,” explains Vamsi Talla, a university student. “Passive devices only reflect the signal and thus create WiFi packets, which is a very energy efficient way of transmitting information.”

In this case, the resulting packages are fully compatible with any modern equipment, and to use this technology does not require special devices.

Devices for the Internet of things, smart homes and similar projects currently require their own communication platforms, since WiFi is quite voracious. In case of successful implementation of such technology, all these devices will be able to switch to using WiFi.