Bluetooth has proven to be an incredibly useful innovation that has enabled wireless connections between devices over short distances with minimal power consumption. However, some engineers have been working on a new Wi-Fi technology that could also replace Bluetooth while consuming even less power.
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Called Passive Wi-Fi, the technology has been designed to deliver data over small distances with a power consumption that is 10,000 times
lower than existing Wi-Fi chipsets and 1,000 times lower than Bluetooth LE and ZigBee. It was developed by a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington who will be discussing their recent work at the 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in March.
The main innovation in the use of Passive Wi-Fi is the use of only a digital baseband in Wi-Fi chips, where as most of today’s Wi-Fi chips use both digital and analog RFs.
