‘Power over Wi-Fi’ named game changing technology by PopSci
Described in a paper earlier this year, the PoWiFi system is claimed to deliver power to energy-harvesting sensors and other low-energy devices while preserving Wi-Fi network performance (see Using Wi-Fi to power the IoT). The paper details how the researchers were able to harvest energy from Wi-Fi signals to power a temperature sensor, a camera, and a Jawbone wearable device.
The concept behind the system is that Wi-Fi receivers could, in addition to retrieving the normal information being transmitted over Wi-Fi, be designed to harvest energy in these signals as well – the latter being provided by non-intrusive superfluous "power traffic" injected onto multiple 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi channels. PoWiFi works with existing Wi-Fi chipsets and consists of a PoWiFi router, antenna, and harvester.
“For the first time we’ve shown that you can use Wi-Fi devices to power the sensors in cameras and other devices,” says lead author Vamsi Talla, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student. “We also made a system that can co-exist as a Wi-Fi router and a power source — it doesn’t degrade the quality of your Wi-Fi signals while it’s powering devices."
The final paper on the PoWiFi system will be presented later this year at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CoNEXT 2015 conference in Heidelberg, Germany. For more, see Powering the Next Billion Devices with Wi-Fi (PDF).
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