Now, use Internet with 'no power' Wi-Fi

A new communication system called Wi-Fi backscatter uses the signals of radio frequency as a power source and reuses the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to provide Internet connectivity to battery-free devices.

University of Washington engineers designed this new communication system where this not-so-distant "Internet of Things" reality would extend connectivity to perhaps billions of devices.

Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering said that if the "Internet of Things" devices were going to take off, they must provide connectivity to the potentially billions of battery-free devices that will be embedded in everyday objects and they now had the ability to enable Wi-Fi connectivity for devices while consuming orders of magnitude less power than what Wi-Fi typically required.

The research showed that how low-powered devices such as temperature sensors or wearable technology could run without batteries or cords by harnessing energy from existing radio, TV and wireless signals in the air.

Co-author Joshua Smith, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering said that one might think, how could this possibly work when one had a low-power device making such a tiny change in the wireless signal but the point was, if one was looking for specific patterns, one could can find it among all the other Wi-Fi reflections in an environment.