Advantages of Passive WiFi | disadvantages of Passive WiFi
This page covers advantages and disadvantages of Passive WiFi. It mentions Passive WiFi advantages or benefits and Passive WiFi disadvantages or drawbacks.
What is Passive WiFi?
As we know traditional wifi consumes about 60% of total energy in mobile phones due to following three reasons in
three different scenarios.
1. In ideal mode: In this mode, it constantly searches for wifi signal from router (or AP)
in order to make connection by exchang of messages.
2. In connected mode (with signal is proper) : In this mode, it sends/receives data regularly
to keep connection alive.
3. In connected mode (with signal is weak): It tries to boost its own signal which
requires power. This is required to transmit data packet properly.
➨Passive wifi has been developed to extend battery life by consuming less power.
This has become possible by separating RF and baseband portions on different modules.
• In order to fulfill the power savings objective, passive wifi design
consists of two parts viz. passive wifi device and plugged-in device.
• Plugged in device houses power consuming RF components viz. RF synthesizer,
PA (Power Amplifier) with transmitter which emits single tone RF carrier. Moreover plugged in device
takes care of carrier sense and MAC (Medium Access Control) across multiple passive wifi devices.
• Passive wifi device contains all the digital baseband components.
Benefits or advantages of Passive WiFi
Following are the benefits or advantages of Passive WiFi:
➨It consumes fourth orders (i.e. 10000x) of less power compare to existing wifi chips and
1000x lower power compare to bluetooth LE/Zigbee.
➨Passive wifi covers distances of upto 30 to 100 feet in various LOS (Line of Sight) and through-the wall scenarios.
➨It makes design of passive wifi IC simple due to segregation of RF part and baseband part
on different modules.
➨As passive wifi requires only digital functionalities on IC,
it helps to design passive wifi IC at very low cost on various devices viz. smartphone, tablet, laptop etc.
➨It uses legacy wifi routers or access points (APs) to establish the wifi network.
Hence it is compliant to existing wifi (i.e. WLAN, Wireless LAN) standards.
➨All the MAC functionalities such as RF carrier sense, wifi connection establishment procedure,
exchange of messages to keep connection alive etc. are handled by plugged-in device.
This saves battery power to a great extent.
Drawbacks or disadvantages of Passive WiFi
Following are the drawbacks or disadvantages of Passive WiFi:
➨In order to use passive wifi, plugged in device housing RF part is a must as passive wifi device does not
contain the same. This makes it difficult for passive wifi users to make use of traditional wifi where passive wifi plugged-in
devices are not installed. Moreover in order to use passive wifi also, the devices require support of
plugged-in devices.
➨Refer advantages and disadvantages of wifi network >> .
WiFi Technology RELATED LINKS
WLAN standards-11a,11b,11g,11n,11ac WLAN tutorial WLAN MAC protocol 11a WLAN Physical layer 11b WLAN Physical layer 11n WLAN Physical layer WLAN 802.11-ac WLAN 802.11-ad
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