WiFi: Wireless Power Could Make The Internet Of Things A Reality

The University of Washington has a team of engineers who have tapped into a previously underused source of energy, found commonly in most homes, to provide power to several different kinds of devices - a WiFi router.

The team used a WiFi signal to harvest energy and power a host of devices, including a simple temperature sensor, a Jawbone activity tracking bracelet's charger, and a low-resolution greyscale camera. The system they used, called Power Over WiFi, or PoWiFi, is being considered a technological game changer by Popular Science, being named to the magazine's "Best of What's New" awards.

"For the first time we've shown that you can use WiFi devices to power the sensors in cameras and other devices," Vamsi Talla, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student and lead author, said. "We also made a system that can coexist as a WiFi router and a power source - it doesn't degrade the quality of your WiFi signals while it's powering devices."

This innovation has the potential to enable the development of the widely discussed Internet of Things, a proposed network of physical objects exchanging and collecting data to constantly improve performance. This network would include everyday objects, ranging from coffee makers and cell phones to washing machines and air conditioners, allowing these objects to "talk" to one another wirelessly. The major challenge the Internet of Things has faced is a way to provide energy to the low-power actuators and sensors that would be required to make it a reality. 

The University of Washington team optimized a router to use unused WiFi channels to send out superfluous "power packets" without affecting data transmission speed and quality. This technique basically beefs up the WiFi signal to account for power delivery.

The WiFi router was then able to power an Omnivision VGA camera with enough power to capture an image every 35 minutes - from 17 feet away. It also recharged a Jawbone Up24 fitness tracker from absolutely dead to a 41 percent charge in two-and-a-half hours. Despite these being displays of only small amounts of power, the team believes that the PoWiFi system could be capable of powering real-world objects without any negative effects to network performance.

PoWiFi was tested in six different homes, without the users noticing any real changes in their network's ability to load web pages or stream video. 

"In the future, PoWiFi could leverage technology power scaling to further improve the efficiency of the system to enable operation at larger distances and power numerous more sensors and applications," Shyam Gollakota, coauthor and assistant professor of computer science and engineering, said in a news release.

The final paper on PoWiFi is set to be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's 2015 conference, CoNEXT, held in Heidelberg, Germany, according to a news release.

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