UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
washington.edu
UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
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Re: UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
#210,000 times lower power, but achieving speeds up to 11Mbps
Being named passive wifi. Quite neat and could be useful for IoT considering also approx 100 ft distance
Re: UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
#310,000 times lower power, but achieving speeds up to 11Mbps Being named passive wifi. Quite neat and could be useful for IoT considering also approx 100 ft distance
You won't be downloading OS images very well, but it's still a lot.
That's two HD videos simultaneously, with some to spare.
Re: UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
#410,000 times lower power, but achieving speeds up to 11Mbps Being named passive wifi. Quite neat and could be useful for IoT considering also approx 100 ft distance
You won't be downloading OS images very well, but it's still a lot. That's two HD videos simultaneously, with some to spare.
Only if you have the whole channel available for that one device. Wi-Fi is a shared medium - devices at slow bitrates use the same amount of airtime that could be used by a faster device to send much more data. So a) if you're in a dense wi-fi environment, every bit sent with this system takes away much more than 1 bit worth of time from faster devices, and b) assuming the array of sensors mentioned in the article is around a dozen or two devices, we're down into the sub-Mbps range per device.
Still better than bluetooth, and very useful for the kinds of data that low-power sensors would send, but not the kind of performance you'd want for pushing media files or really high-detail sensor data.
(Hence the performance benefits for large greenfield networks of dropping support for low bitrates - both preventing old clients from hogging the channel, and obviating the need to send control traffic at the slower bitrates.)
Re: UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
#5This seem another wifi achievement only replicable in a desert environment, during a solar maximum, on the dark side of the moon, while holding a black cat.
If you are using a "wifi" antenna then that antenna is going to be picking up all sorts of little things. Normally these aren't much of an issue, but at these sensitivities suddenly that phone down the hall, the one not running at a 10e-3 power setting, is a real issue.
Also, February 2016?
Re: UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
#6The low-power devices don't actually generate any signal at all thus don't have to pay that expensive power cost. Instead a passive antenna is modulated to reflect or absorb ambient signal, the reflected signal conforms to traditional 802.11 packets. The ambient signals are created by a relatively high-powered device that is plugged into wall power.
Here is a 2 minute video showing an early prototype of their work from 2014:
Re: UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
#7This is great research!
10,000 times lower power is only for the "passive wifi" devices, but these passive wifi devices require a "heavy-lifting and power-consuming plugged-in device" nearby.
Assuming that device consumes no more than a traditional wifi device, then the overall system would consume:
[usual consumption of 1 wifi device] + [# of passive devices] * [usual consumption] / 10000
[usual consumption of 1 wifi device] / [# of passive devices]
Re: UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
#8This is great research! 10,000 times lower power is only for the "passive wifi" devices, but these passive wifi devices require a "heavy-lifting and power-consuming plugged-in device" nearby. Assuming that device consumes no more than a traditional wifi device, then the overall system would consume: [usual consumption of 1 wifi device] + [# of passive devices] * [usual consumption] / 10000 So, if we want to calculate…
It's not really the overall power savings that is the key advantage of the system though. Rather it's being able to have a multitude of low power devices that you don't have to run wall power to. They can either run for quite a long time off of battery, or even harvest power from RF signals.
Re: UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
#9It looks like this can only transmit, not actually receive and interpret data-- and if you listen carefully, this is the kind of applications they're suggesting.
That's good for sensor nodes reporting status, but not so good for interactivity.
Re: UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power
#10I wonder why there isn't a WEP-like protocol using AES-CCMP. (of course, without the problems of WEP)