TAMING THE HUNGER FOR POWER Wi-Fi is everywhere in our daily lives, invisibly connecting laptops to printers, allowing smartphones to make calls, stream movies, and letting online gamers battle it out. The downside to this is that connecting to Wi-Fi consumes significant energy resources for devices, and this often leads to drained batteries. Now, a team of University of Washington computer scientists and electrical engineers have created a method that would allow the generation of Wi-Fi transmissions at 10,000 times less power compared to conventional methods. Their project, which they dubbed as Passive Wi-Fi , could potentially unseat existing energy-efficient wireless platforms such as Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee. “We wanted to see if we could achieve Wi-Fi transmissions using almost no power at all,” said co-author Shyam Gollakota. “That’s basically what Passive Wi-Fi delivers. We can get Wi-Fi for...
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