dgstorm
Editor in Chief
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
