UW Team Shatters Long-Range Communication Barrier for Devices That Consume Almost No Power

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

“It’s like trying to listen to a conversation happening on the other side of a thick wall — you might hear some faint voices but you can’t quite make out the words,” said Mehrdad Hessar, an Allen School doctoral student. “With our new technology we can essentially decode those words even when the conversation itself is hard to hear.”

To overcome the problem, the UW team introduced a new type of modulation — called chirp spread spectrum — into its backscatter design. Spreading the reflected signals across multiple frequencies allowed the team to achieve much greater sensitivities and decode backscattered signals across greater distances even when it’s below the noise.

“We basically started with a clean slate and said if what we really need to enable smart applications is long-range communication, how could we design the system from the ground up to achieve that goal?” said Bryce Kellogg, a co-founder at Jeeva Wireless who was a UW electrical engineering student.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Co-authors include Joshua Smith, professor in the Allen School and the UW Department of Electrical Engineering, and UW electrical engineering doctoral student Ali Najafi.

Original by: Jennifer Langston

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