UW Engineers Achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 Times Lower Power

University of Washington (UW) in Seattle is one of the top institutes of higher learning in the United States. The researchers at the UW come up with some interesting and amazing discoveries. Just recently, with the help of research that was funded by the National Science Foundation, the University of Washington and Qualcomm, the computer scientists and electrical engineers at the UW demonstrated that you can achieve WiFi transmissions using almost no power at all. I know it sounds crazy but check this out. They are able to generate “passive” WiFi transmission that uses 10,000 times less power than conventional methods.

The following video demonstrates how this technology works. Normally, in a WiFi transmission, there is an analog and digital operation involved in the radio transmissions. It’s not the digital component that eats up all the energy because it has been tweaked enough over the past few decades, it’s the analog portion that’s the culprit. The researchers at UW essentially separated the two components, which resulted in WiFi transmissions that use extremely low power. Click the image below to watch the video to and see how it works.

You can only imagine what Passive WiFi can do for Internet of Things (IoT). It’s likely to have a significant impact on the IoT phenomenon and opens up the door to other advancements in wireless technologies.

“We wanted to see if we could achieve Wi-Fi transmissions using almost no power at all,” said co-author Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. “That’s basically what Passive Wi-Fi delivers. We can get Wi-Fi for 10,000 times less power than the best thing that’s out there.”

Check out the rest of the article. It has some very interesting information and much more details about this fascinating achievement.