Researchers Make Low-Power Wi-Fi Breakthrough (networkworld.com)

alphadogg writes: The biggest downside of Wi-Fi for most users might be that it can really drain your smartphone or tablet battery, but a research team at the University of Washington has come up with a way to make using the nearly ubiquitous wireless technology in a less taxing way. They have demonstrated a technique for using 10,000 times less power than typical Wi-Fi (well, at up to 11Mbps anyway) and next month will present a paper titled "Passive Wi-Fi: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions" at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design in Santa Clara. The main trick involves decoupling digital and analog components of a typical Wi-Fi router.

Comments

Re:I'd prefer long range

[swb]

Besides the power requirements, the problem with long range is that there's limited spectrum allocation so your extended range ends up being someone else's interference and you both end up with reduced throughput due to competition for the spectrum.

Then there's the security implication of excess range -- your network being reachable where you might not want it reachable. Sure, you're relying on security to prevent malicious access, but that works better when there's no access at all.

The question I would have is if they only have the data rate is only 11 Mbps, it seems to cover a lot of the use cases already covered by Bluetooth.

Re:I'd prefer long range

[Eloking]

Blazing speed and low power are less important to me than long range. And these router manufacturers are getting rather annoying with their "specs." Oh, it covers 14,000 square feet. That's a square less than 120 feet on a side. So what? That's what you get for 600 mW of output power?

Why not both?

I didn't read TFA, but if that passive antenna is slower and have less range, it won't replace the wifi of our smartphone anytime soon.

But I don't think it'll be impossible to implement that passive technology to actual antenna. So if you're not using a lot of data (sleep mode) and a good wifi signal is available, the phone could turn off the "active" antenna and activate the "passive" low power one.

Just an idea.