New radio technology: 'Braidio' tech lets mobile devices share power read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/706-new-radio-technology-braidio-tech-lets-mobile-devices-share-power

A team from University of Massachusetts Amherst led by professor Deepak Ganesan introduced a new radio technology that allows small mobile devices to take advantage of battery power in larger devices nearby for communication.

Ganesan and his graduate students designed and testing a prototype radio that could help to extend the life of batteries in small, mass-market mobile devices, such as fitness trackers and smartwatches.

They dubbed the new technology Braidio, it extends battery life hundreds of times in some cases.

Battery size in portable devices is equivalent to their size. Larger the device, the larger its battery. A laptop battery is thousand times larger than one in a fitness tracker, a hundred times larger than in a smartwatch, and 10 times larger than in a cell phone. Although these devices can't take advantage of the differences.

It transfers the capacity of offload storage and computation from personal computers to the resource-rich cloud. It makes sense that devices should also be able to offload how much power they consume for communication to devices that have more energy.

The ‘energy offload’ system developed by the researchers uses modified Bluetooth to allow it to work in a way similar to radio-frequency identification (RFID).

Braidio operates like a standard Bluetooth radio when a device has sufficient energy, but operates like RFID when energy is low, offloading energy use to a device with a larger battery when needed. It offers roughly 400 times longer battery life than Bluetooth, since the smaller device's battery is preserved longer.

"To be clear, our results only cover the cost of communication or transmitting data," says Pan Hu, graduate student in the College of Information and Computer Sciences.

If a radio is transmitting from a camera that consumes hundreds of millwatts while using its sensor, clearly the sensors may dominate total power consumption and reduce the benefits of optimizing the radio.

Braidio's radio frequency front end operate in different modes while consuming power comparable to a Bluetooth radio and using simple, low-cost components.

Ganesan says, technologies like Braidio open up a new way of thinking about the design of mobile and wearable devices.