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:

Free 6G Training: Zero-Energy Devices and Air Interface
Free 6G Training: NTT Docomo's revised '5G Evolution and 6G' White Paper
Free 6G Training: Leveraging mmWave 5G to Wirelessly Power IoT Devices
Free 6G Training: Monitoring Health with Skin patch and Smartwear
Connectivity Technology Blog: InterDigital’s 6G Vision of “Zero-energy” (ZE) air-interface designs
The 3G4G Blog: Introduction to 5G Reduced Capability (RedCap) Devices
Connectivity Technology Blog: The Wide Variety of Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies for Different Situations
The 3G4G Blog: 5G Non IP Data Delivery and Lightweight M2M (LwM2M) over NIDD
The 3G4G Blog: Mobile Initiated Connection Only (MICO) mode in 5G System
The 3G4G Blog: Embedded SIM (eSIM) and Integrated SIM (iSIM)
The 3G4G Blog: Are there 50 Billion IoT Devices yet?
3G4G: Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-2-Machine (M2M)

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