Engineers make WiFi work, consuming 10,000 times less power

Engineers from the University of Washington demonstrated the Passive Wi-Fi system, which can exchange information using wireless technology, spending 10,000 times less energy on this than conventional devices. The system is also 1,000 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 has already been named among the 10 breakthroughs of 2016 by the MIT Technology Review .

“We wanted to know if it’s possible to achieve WiFi transmission without consuming any energy,” explains Shyam Gollakota, 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 still able to work at a speed of 11 mbps, which, of course, is 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 onset of the era of the Internet of things.



This saving is 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 one is used alone on the entire network, and plugs into the outlet. A set of sensors of the digital module sends information, simply reflecting and absorbing the signal from the analog. During tests, it was found that a set of WiFi sensors can work with a smartphone at a distance of about 100 m.

“All network work and other energy-consuming activities are carried out by one device connected to a power 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.”

At the same time, the resulting packages are fully compatible with any modern equipment, and special devices are not required to use this technology.

Devices for the Internet of things, smart homes, and similar projects currently require their own communication platforms, since WiFi is quite voracious. If this technology is successfully implemented, all of these devices will be able to switch to using WiFi.