One of the main characteristics by which today I could roughly say that Bluetooth is still being used instead of WiFi for wireless connections lies precisely in the energy of both technologies. Despite the fact that WiFi is much more robust and versatile than Bluetooth, the truth is that it needs a much higher power consumption to work, something that directly affects devices that use batteries.
All this could soon change thanks to the work carried out by a group of researchers from the University of Washington who have managed to develop, thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation and Qualcomm, a new, much more efficient WiFi technology, a technology that has been baptized by its developers like Passive Wi-Fi o Passive WiFi in our language.
Passive WiFi is the technology capable of making Bluetooth obsolete
This new project, presented at the beginning of this year 2016, has finally been able to be successfully tested. Thanks to these tests, it has been possible to demonstrate how Passive WiFi technology only consumes between 15 and 60 microwatts. This consumption, if we put it in perspective, is up to 10.000 times less than the consumption generated in more traditional uses or 1.000 times less than the consumption of platforms such as Zigbee or Bluetooth LE.
Unfortunately this technology also has a number of disadvantages. A clear example is that, by reducing consumption, bandwidth is also reduced. Despite this decrease, we find that Passive WiFi offers a higher bandwidth than we have in Bluetooth LE while it is possible to continue transmitting information to a maximum distance of 30,5 meters.
As a final detail, tell you that, at least for now, those responsible for the project are still in full development so, at least and for a few years, this technology will not reach our mobile devices. According to those responsible, we will be able to learn much more details about this new technology in March 2017 during the USENIX Symposium.
Further information: University of Washington