Passive Wi-Fi Uses 10,000 Times Less Power Than Standard; Likely to Replace Bluetooth

[dgstorm]

Engineers in the United States have made the final breakthrough for technology called Passive Wi-Fi. It's set to drive the revolution of the IoT (Internet of Things) and replace Bluetooth eventually. Passive Wi-Fi can generate an 11Mbps Wi-Fi connection, and although that doesn't seem very impressive, it does it with 10,000 times less power than standard Wi-Fi connections.

Additionally, the latest successful tests for Passive Wi-Fi had a range of 100 feet (30 meters) and consumed 1,000 times less energy, but with up to 11 times faster speeds than existing low energy standards, like Bluetooth and Zigbee.

Here's a quote with a few more details,

"To achieve such low-power Wi-Fi transmissions, the team essentially decoupled the digital and analog operations involved in radio transmissions.

The Passive Wi-Fi architecture assigns the analog, power-intensive functions - like producing a signal at a specific frequency - to a single device in the network that is plugged into the wall.

An array of sensors produces Wi-Fi packets of information using very little power by simply reflecting and absorbing that signal using a digital switch."

Joshua Smith, associate professor of computer science and engineering had this to say about the breakthrough, "Now that we can achieve Wi-Fi for tens of microwatts of power and can do much better than both Bluetooth and ZigBee, you could now imagine using Wi-Fi for everything."

It's amazing the magical things the wizards of engineering can create! Check out the video in the thread below for a demo of the new Passive Wi-Fi tech.

Source: gadgets.ndtv

 

[dgstorm]

Here's that video of Passive Wi-Fi in action:

 

[LordBaal]

This is a big breakthrough for the internet of things, that's for sure. Specially for devices that not necessarily are plugged to a wall and operate on batteries or for inventory purposes.

As for the mobile devices themselves, the battery save mode could include reducing the speed and range of your wi-fi to this passive mode, it seems like a good enough trade-off if you are not streaming HD video or sharing huge files or something.