The Future of Wi-Fi Is 10,000 Times More Energy Efficient | Aptil Glaser | Wired.com | Surfing the Broadband Bit Stream | Scoop.it

Get ready to send a thank-you note to students at the University of Washington, where a group of electrical engineers is trying to solve the eternal struggle of Wi-Fi battery drain. It’s a problem that’s rapidly getting worse as more and more devices require access to the cloud, not to mention the constant strain of searching for a good signal or boosting a weak one.

The student researchers invented a new type of hardware that uses 10,000 times less power than traditional Wi-Fi networking equipment. It’s called Passive Wi-Fi, (you can read their paper here) and it works just like a home router, just more efficiently. To give some perspective, the state of the art in low power Wi-Fi transmissions today consume 100s of milliwatts of power, whereas the technology the student researchers developed consume only 10-50 microwatts—10,000 times lower power.


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