PoWiFi: wireless coverage and wireless charging

PoWiFi: wireless coverage and wireless charging

Recently, a group of innovative WiFi developers have finally created an innovative WiFi router (prototype) that not only provides wireless access to the Internet, wireless charging can also be an attractive innovation! These developers are engineers from the US University of Washington. They have been working hard to develop this innovative router named PoWiFi since last year.

 

Ambient Backscatter Technology

In fact, wireless charging is nothing new, but PoWiFi is particularly important (or advantageous) in its ability to use existing hardware, such as AP/wireless router, it also provides wireless transmission and wireless charging. Specifically, PoWiFi uses a new technology called Ambient Backscatter, this technology is also known as the WiFi back-to-reflection technology, which enables two Wireless RF devices without batteries to communicate with each other through reverse scattering, the device is powered by signals captured by radio frequencies (that is, the sent radio waves are converted to DC ).

Of course, considering the power of the AP/wireless router, this technology is not suitable for charging mobile terminals such as mobile phones, but for providing power to IOT terminals (low-power sensors; at the same time, it can charge small lithium batteries, but the current charging efficiency is affected by the power of wireless devices, it is not ideal. For example, as the project's chief engineer, Shyam Gollakota places six PoWiFi routers in six different homes during the experiment, and uses PoWiFi to charge a 5-meter camera, it takes 35 minutes to charge for a photo.

However, for the future, especially in the IOT era, PoWiFi will not aim to charge batteries, but directly use the wireless signals of AP/wireless routers to power the sensors at the bottom of Iot, the current batteries used by Iot devices will disappear.

Will this charging affect the performance of wireless transmission (WiFi? According to the feedback from current experiments and six household users, there is almost no impact. Therefore, it can be predicted that PoWiFi will become the mainstream in the future!