What is Passive WiFi?

Passive WiFi is a new leap into the future. This is a substantial improvement on one of the most popular network systems out there. The growth in the use of low-power mobile devices has increased the number of users connecting to the Internet efficiently and without using the conventional wired system used for years by desktop computers.

This note will quickly describe what passive WiFi is all about so that this new technology does not catch you off guard.

One of the main attractions of wireless or WiFi networks is the low power consumption of the devices connected to these networks. However, one of the most outstanding achievements of researchers at the University of Washington is having created a system that considerably increases the energy efficiency of WiFi networks.

To give you an idea of the enormous contribution to energy saving that these researchers present, we can tell you that it is on the order of 10,000 times less consumption than a conventional wireless network. This new WiFi network enhancement technology has been called Passive WiFi and represents a large-scale optimization of popular WiFi networks.

The key to this incredible energy savings is in the new hardware they have developed to send and receive information over wireless networks. They are devices that are capable of consuming an amount of energy between 10 and 50 microwatts, while conventional equipment consumes the amount of 100 milliwatts.

A conventional WiFi network is based on the use of two radio devices that send and receive information, both working on the same frequency using a transmitter and a baseband chip. The first device creates the radio wave, and the second one associates the information with the wave and encodes it.

While passive WiFi is based on the fact that only one of the radio devices produces the signal sent to the second device through passive sensors that only have a baseband chip and an antenna, considerably reducing energy use.

Passive WiFi promises to become the new link in the chain of advances in wireless communications, making these much more efficient and ecological, which will improve the performance of mobile devices which are currently more connected to the Internet around the world.