Summary:
Wireless communication has become a daily usage utility like water and electricity in private or business life. Because this technology is so fundamental to human lives, as a professor of Communication Engineering, he decided to look into this technology. Just like every coin has two sides, he gave us 4 major drawbacks of this technology. First, the capacity of radio waves is expensive. And we are simply running out of spectrum. Another problem is efficiency. He calculated the efficiency of base stations in field, and he found out efficiency rate is only about 5 percent. The majority of energy consumption is used to cool base stations itself. Next, security, radio waves can penetrate through walls. Hence, it can be easily intercepted by someone else. Without proper data encryption mechanism, the data is easily to be stolen by people in other place that we are not aware. Finally, electromagnetic wave can interrupt each other. That is why we are asked to switch off electronic devices on aircraft cabins or hospitals.
Wireless communication has become a daily usage utility like water and electricity in private or business life. Because this technology is so fundamental to human lives, as a professor of Communication Engineering, he decided to look into this technology. Just like every coin has two sides, he gave us 4 major drawbacks of this technology. First, the capacity of radio waves is expensive. And we are simply running out of spectrum. Another problem is efficiency. He calculated the efficiency of base stations in field, and he found out efficiency rate is only about 5 percent. The majority of energy consumption is used to cool base stations itself. Next, security, radio waves can penetrate through walls. Hence, it can be easily intercepted by someone else. Without proper data encryption mechanism, the data is easily to be stolen by people in other place that we are not aware. Finally, electromagnetic wave can interrupt each other. That is why we are asked to switch off electronic devices on aircraft cabins or hospitals.
He then proposed a solution. There are 14 billion of light bulbs installed already. Light has been around us for many millions of years. Visible light is inherently safe to use and can be considered unharm to human beings. So the question is, can light be used for wireless communication? The answer is yes because light is also part of the spectrum. And it is larger than radio waves spectrum. Other than that, we already have 14 billion light bulbs installed around us and they can be used for communication. What we need to do is to replace inefficient light bulbs with LEDs and install microchips to control potential illumination devices. That means we can leverage what we already have today, enable data transmission functionality with a little extra enhancement. We can save tremendous cost to re-build the entire infrastructure. The other question is security, because light cannot penetrate through walls, so it can be consider safer than un-encrypted wireless data.
The last challenge of this new technology is bandwidth. The speaker said by transmitting data with OFDM modulation technique. Bandwidth issue can be solved. At the end, he said we already have 14 billion illumination devices. With this technology, we can save hundreds of power plants because the light is not only used of illumination. We can have a greener, and a brighter future.
My opinion:
I think this is innovation can shake the entire planet. I have to admit as an engineer, we usually do not care so much about power consumption of fixed devices. Instead, we care about the overall throughput and performance because the majority of consumers pay more attention to them as well. In most of the cases, that means more energy consumption due to the fact that electricity of fixed devices comes from wired, not from battery. I think that is one root cause why the energy efficiency is so low.
I think this is innovation can shake the entire planet. I have to admit as an engineer, we usually do not care so much about power consumption of fixed devices. Instead, we care about the overall throughput and performance because the majority of consumers pay more attention to them as well. In most of the cases, that means more energy consumption due to the fact that electricity of fixed devices comes from wired, not from battery. I think that is one root cause why the energy efficiency is so low.
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