Skip to main content

Rethinking LiFi for Low-Power and Long Range RF Backscatter

Interest in zero-energy/low-energy IoT is gaining ground as the industry tries to introduce more of these with minimal impact to the environment. A research team of IMDEA Networks Institute has introduced Internet of Things (IoT) devices that communicate without any batteries and harvest energy and receive data through visible light. A news article reported:

This represents a new step towards making battery-free devices a reality, through the convergence of two emerging technologies: LiFi and radio frequency (RF) backscatter. Potential applications include smart homes, smart cities, and smart agriculture.

It is expected that more than 64 billion IoT devices will be deployed by 2025, and they will work with batteries. The chemical components of these batteries threaten to have a huge environmental impact on the Earth. There is a pressing need to find a solution for removing the batteries without affecting communication performance and IoT services.

IMDEA researchers propose that IoT devices will operate with the energy provided by Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) and any other light source, and data provided by modulating these LEDs, a concept called LiFi, and that IoT devices will send data back by reflecting and modulating the RF coming signals already present in the environment, a passive and low-energy transmission technique called RF backscatter.

You can read the complete article here. You can download the paper from here or PDF from here.

Related Posts: 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Laser Inter-Satellite Links (LISLs) in a Starlink Constellation

When we first talked about Starlink back in 2019 , we saw in the video that the concept involved laser communication to communicate between the satellites. While the initially launched satellites did not have the laser communication mechanism built in, it looks like they are being added to the newer ones.  A report from Fast Company in late 2021 said: One of the next big upgrades in telecom will involve satellites firing lasers at each other—to beam data, not blow stuff up. The upside of replacing traditional radio-frequency communication with lasers, that encode data as pulses of light, can be much like that of deploying fiber-optic cable for terrestrial broadband: much faster speeds and much lower latency. “Laser links in orbit can reduce long-distance latency by as much as 50%, due to higher speed of light in vacuum & shorter path than undersea fiber,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted in July about the upgrade now beginning for that firm’s Starlink satellite constellation. ...
1 comment
Read more

IEEE 802.11bn Ultra High Reliability (UHR), a.k.a. Wi-Fi 8

Back in 2020 we looked at the introductory post of Wi-Fi 7 which was followed up by a more detailed post in Feb 2022. We are now following on with an introductory post on the next generation Wi-Fi.  A new paper on arXiv explores the journey towards IEEE 802.11bn Ultra High Reliability (UHR), the amendment that will form the basis of Wi-Fi 8. Quoting selected items from the paper  below: After providing an overview of the nearly completed Wi-Fi 7 standard, we present new use cases calling for further Wi-Fi evolution. We also outline current standardization, certification, and spectrum allocation activities, sharing updates from the newly formed UHR Study Group. We then introduce the disruptive new features envisioned for Wi-Fi 8 and discuss the associated research challenges. Among those, we focus on access point coordination and demonstrate that it could build upon 802.11be multi-link operation to make Ultra High Reliability a reality in Wi-Fi 8. The IEEE 802.11bn UHR: Whose ...
Post a Comment
Read more

NTT Docomo's Disaster Countermeasures to Keep People Connected

Recently I blogged about Disaster Roaming in 3GPP Release-17. While this will take time to be implemented worldwide, it is already available in Japan, maybe not in the 3GPP standardised way. Similarly, back in 2011, I blogged about Earthquake and Tsunami Warning service (ETWS) from NTT Docomo's Journal, it was two days before the  2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami hit. Japan is no stranger to earthquakes, typhoons, and other natural disasters, which can have a devastating effect on infrastructure. To ensure that the mobile networks keep functioning, operators work extremely hard to ensure people remain connected one way or another. NTT Docomo has released a video detailing the countermeasures to keep everyone connected in case of emergencies. The following detail is provided with the video: DOCOMO's network is no exception, and our services could get cut off by a base station power outage, disconnected fiber-optic cable, or other malfunctions. DOCOMO established the three p...
Post a Comment
Read more