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Home » Passive Wi-Fi: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions
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Passive Wi-Fi: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions

Authors: 

Bryce Kellogg, Vamsi Talla, Shyamnath Gollakota, and Joshua R. Smith, University of Washington

Awarded Best Paper

Abstract: 

Wi-Fi has traditionally been considered a power-consuming communication system and has not been widely adopting in the sensor network and IoT space. We introduce Passive Wi-Fi that demonstrates for the first time that one can generate 802.11b transmissions using backscatter communication, while consuming 3–4 orders of magnitude lower power than existing Wi-Fi chipsets. Passive Wi-Fi transmissions can be decoded on any Wi-Fi device including routers, mobile phones and tablets. Building on this, we also present a network stack design that enables passive Wi-Fi transmitters to coexist with other devices in the ISM band, without incurring the power consumption of carrier sense and medium access control operations. We build prototype hardware and implement all four 802.11b bit rates on an FPGA platform. Our experimental evaluation shows that passive Wi-Fi transmissions can be decoded on off-the-shelf smartphones and Wi-Fi chipsets over distances of 30–100 feet in various line-of-sight and through-the-wall scenarios. Finally, we design a passive Wi-Fi IC that shows that 1 and 11 Mbps transmissions consume 14.5 and 59.2 µW respectively. This translates to 10000x lower power than existing Wi-Fi chipsets and 1000x lower power than Bluetooth LTE and ZigBee.

Bryce Kellogg, University of Washington

Vamsi Talla, University of Washington

Shyamnath Gollakota, University of Washington

Joshua R. Smith, University of Washington

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {194920,
author = {Bryce Kellogg and Vamsi Talla and Shyamnath Gollakota and Joshua R. Smith},
title = {Passive {Wi-Fi}: Bringing Low Power to {Wi-Fi} Transmissions},
booktitle = {13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16)},
year = {2016},
isbn = {978-1-931971-29-4},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {151--164},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi16/technical-sessions/presentation/kellogg},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar,
}
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