US boffins propose yet another low-low power Wi-Fi for Things University of Washington boffins are touting extremely low-power Wi-Fi transmissions – if your application can put up with a maximum 11 Mbps capacity. The students and boffins, Bryce Kellogg, Vamsi Talla, Shyamnath Gollakota and Joshua Smith of the University of Washington, have in mind the kind of low-power devices that will …
Exactly. This here is is still an idea a the proof of concept stage, and a very clever one. That being said, security and encryption should be on the to do list when the protocols are developed from day one. Because it won't work that well when this is just layered on top as an afterthought.
The point being of course that encryption is rather power-hungry and might negate all your "passive" savings. The other point being that most of the time in a two-way radio link it's NOT the transmitter killing your battery, but the RECEIVER. A wall switch potentially only needs to turn on its transmitter for a split second whenever its button is pushed - yet a receiver also gobbles up power like nobody's business but it has to turn on at the very least periodically, and the less often it does the bigger your latencies become, quickly compounded by one or two potentially missed RX windows or corrupted transmissions...
Pssst... you need to do bi-weekly blood sacrifices, your blood only mind you, to your computing equipment. Does wonders here. I make double-digits!
I do wonder what sacrificing a White Goat, say a Comcast customer service rep or executive, would do for the Wi-Fi, but I don't want to have to dispose of the evidence.
We've been using this principle in radars and navigation beacons in the US Navy for a good long while. By shorting diodes a 360 degree rotating pattern, or even direct beams, could be imposed upon the analog microwave (RADAR, TACAN, &c.) signal.; Better known as Phased Array. Very, very cute.
Even encrypted and such, half or a tenth of that 11 Mbps would be handy around here. Usually, that's the best for Wi-Fi data signals here anyway. Thank you, Comcast. [It's not my router, nor my account.] Definitely something to play with and you could probably do some neat things with sensors, far beyond what's available as IoT.
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