Gadgets of the future will be able to use reflected radio waves for data transmission

Imagine that your phone or your smart watch will be able to transmit data using numerous radio waves constantly surrounding us, instead of generating your own. And after all such technology already exists.

This technology is particularly remarkable in that it will significantly reduce the power consumption of gadgets. Last year, researchers from Washington State University managed to create the first prototype of a device using the principle of backscattering of television radio waves to transmit data at a distance. Surprisingly, the device worked without any power source.

Such a device does not generate its own signal, but instead absorbs or reflects binary information from the existing ones around the signals. With the help of television waves, scientists managed to achieve a data transfer rate of 1 KB per second. This is not so much, but the discovery laid the foundation for numerous new research in this area.

Scientists see many ways to use such non-volatile devices in the future. Imagine, for example, that they can be embedded in any structures such as buildings and bridges, and at some point devices will report the potential danger of a building collapse or the presence of some serious defect in it. Such devices can become an ordinary remote control and inform the owner about the place where he can find the lost keychain. And all this without batteries, rechargeable batteries and other power sources.

Researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory UCLA went even further and created a Wi-Fi reflector capable of transmitting data at speeds of up to 3 MB / s with incredibly low power consumption via radio waves from surrounding Wi-Fi devices. Energy consumption is only 0.01% of the normal consumption required for data transmission over the wireless network. Scientists have so far achieved data transmission at a distance of up to 2.5 meters, but they promise to increase this distance to 20 meters in the near future, and the data transfer speed, according to them, should increase to 50 MB / s over time.

Just imagine a smart watch, smartphone or tablet that will be able to receive data from the Internet or communicate with each other, while practically not spending precious energy. These developments are of great value for the creators of modern gadgets, so it is possible that in the future we will see their use in our favorite smart things.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/technology/gadzhety-budushhego-smogut-ispolzovat-otrazhyonnye-radiovolny-dlya-peredachi-dannyx.html.