Engineers at the University of Washington recently created a new wireless communication system allowing devices to interact with each other without the use of wires or a battery for power. Utilizing Wi-Fi, TV or cellular signals from towers already in place, Ambient Backspatter enables a device to detect, harness and reflect this signal to another device. Since these towers already surround us nearly everywhere we go, and the device does not have to generate its own signal, no battery power is therefore required. To put it more plainly? “Our devices form a network out of thin air” says co-author Joshua Smith, a Washington University associate professor of computer science & engineering and of electrical engineering.
 
Initial testing around Seattle took researchers to real-life locales such as apartment buildings, street corners and rooftops. The findings indicated that even devices up to 6.5 miles from a tower were able to communicate successfully. The receiving devices equipped with ambient backspatter technology were able to pick up the signal from their transmitting counterparts at a rate of one kilobit per second at a distance of up to 2.5 feet from each other. While this is by no means “lightning fast”, it is enough to easily send a text message or contact data between devices.
 
Now that the idea is a tried and tested reality, plenty of ideas have been thrown around regarding its real world applications. A favorite of the general population so far is how ambient backspatter could be used to send a message from your couch to your smartphone to alert you to the location of your keys. Even more exciting, with ambient backspatter technology you would still be able to send a text message, even after your phone had died. Lead researcher Shyam Gollakota says it would be “both a source of power and a communication medium”, adding that in the future ambient backspatter technology could be used to prolong the life of wearable computing and even be used in smart homes and self-sustaining sensor networks.
 
The results of the research were published last week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication 2013 conference in Hong Kong and received the conference’s best-paper award for their efforts.