The paper focuses on the reason why wifi is likely to be one of the most favored IOT technology in intelligent household. Wifi has been a connection resolution available anywhere. It is estimated that the sales of wifi will have totaled to nearly 4 trillion sets by 2021. Low speed and low power wifi will be mainly applied in commercial and industrial sectors such as intelligent household, wearable devices, medicine and healthcare. It is anticipated that the smart household market will take up the largest share.
It is commonly known that the key to the success of the IOT is that it can connect a horde of devices across the world through Internet. However, which kind of technology is the most suitable? There are many options, with each providing a different way to set up IOT connection. Among all these technologies, Bluetooth and cellular phone are the most prevailing for the time being. Yet, the final decision draws on the application, scope, data capacity and battery life, and even combined technology will be used.
Compared with other technologies, wifi might be the most popular in the application of intelligent household, which might be ascribed to several reasons, that is, easy to set, supporting original IP network, available to network management tools and familiar to the public.
However, wifi has its shortage as well. It is a power-consuming technology. As such, in order to ensure the practicability of the IOT, measures must be taken to guarantee that it is designed to be energy-saving.
The requriement of wifi chip used in IOT
Any wifi products designed to meet the requirement for low power of IOT generally have features as follows:
In the field of intelligent household, power consumption is the major motivation element
Intelligent household devices (controlled devices) can be divided into three classifications (from the aspect of power consumption)
|
Type |
Power Consumption Sensibility |
|
Powered by on-wall power sources |
Low |
|
Charged |
Middle |
|
Powered by battery |
High |
Given the device powered by battery has high power consumption sensibility, wifi is not applicable for them. As such, power consumption of wifi shall be understood to have a deep understanding of power consumption plan through analyzing the different information exchanges between controller and controlled devices.
Cases are thermostats, smoke alarming bells and intelligent lock.
If devices are set as power saving, then the control device will be in the state of “connected and standby” in the most time when connected.
If devices are set as regular wakening, the device will just receive [a] signal regularly and then turn to the state of sleep
When the incident triggers the data transmission, smoke alarming bell will detect the smoke or fire and then send alarm.
Intelligent lock-intelligent mobile phone (controller) sends order to lock or unlock through APP
In order to fulfill low power consumption, it not only needs to optimize the power consumption in the process of sending and receiving but also the standby power when connected.
Generally, current core of wifi is designed to send data quickly and then receive a large body of data, and it has not been optimized to fulfill the lowest power and expand the life of battery powering the IOT applications.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the wide application of wifi will be the trend of IOT in the future, and the low power consumption will be the key motivation factor. However, it is not an ideal resolution to reuse the core of wifi for the IOT
