Author: Madhu Reddy

Our homes are a tangled mess of wires and chargers. But that might be about to change. Work is under way to use the Wi-Fi signals that surround us to power our gadgets.

In Seattle, six households have taken part in an experiment in which modified electrical devices were put in their homes along with a Wi-Fi router. Over 24 hours, the devices were powered solely by the router’s signal, which also continued to provide wireless internet access to the home.

How was this possible? The energy of the radio waves the router sent out was converted into direct current voltage with a component called a rectifier, much as solar panels convert light energy into electrical energy. That voltage was then boosted to a useful level by a DC-DC converter (arxiv.org/abs/1505.06815).

The system powered temperature sensors and battery-less low-resolution cameras, and charged standard batteries.

The hard part is getting the router to constantly push out enough energy, says team member Vamsi Talla from the University of Washington in Seattle.

When someone is browsing the web, the Wi-Fi signal is active and can be used to power devices. However, when not browsing the signal goes quiet.

“With Wi-Fi for communications, you only want to transmit when you have data to send,” Talla says. “But for power delivery, you want to transmit something all the time. There’s a clear mismatch.”

To get around this, the team designed software that broadcasts meaningless data across several Wi-Fi channels when no one is using the internet.

Small devices could use this as part of an internet of things, says Ben Potter at the University of Reading, UK. “Where we’re heading is to have more sensors in everything around us,” he says. “Innovations with microchips mean they can run with less power. For that type of application, this is interesting technology.”

The problem is that Wi-Fi is never going to provide a very powerful signal. Wi-Fi is tightly regulated in many countries – the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), for example, limits the power of a Wi-Fi broadcast to 1 watt. An iPhone charger delivers at least 5 watts – and has no other demands on its output.

One company with a solution is Ossia in Bellevue, Washington. It has a system called Cota that gets around the FCC regulations by designing a wireless hub that transmits waves at a Wi-Fi frequency but doesn’t send a communications signal.

The Cota set-up can produce up to 20 watts, but would only deliver 1 watt to a single phone. CEO Hatem Zeine says that’s enough to charge an iPhone 5 several times over in a single day if it has constant access to the signal.

“Unlike Wi-Fi, our power signal is unmodulated,” says Zeine. “It’s a continuous wave, there’s no message in it.”

A receiver chip on the device being charged tells the hub which of Cota’s thousands of antennas it is receiving signals from. Those antennas alone are kept active and the system is able to ignore other objects in the room, such as a human body.

Eric Woods, an IT infrastructure researcher at consultancy firm Navigant in London, thinks there will be demand for this type of technology for the many sensors that will fill the smart homes and cities of the future.

Sensors powered by Wi-Fi could be used to monitor air quality or the status of systems across a city, says Woods. “Removing the need to think about batteries takes away one of the barriers to the exploitation of those technologies,” he says.

References:http://www.newscientist.com/

A lot of users are using outdated mobile devices that fail to reach adequate speeds on mobile networks. This is shown by measurements shared by the users of Netradar, a free mobile application that measures mobile connections and devices. The impartial Netradar application is developed and run globally by Aalto University in Finland. The full list of the 150 most popular smart phones and tablets and their average and median top 10 maximum download speeds is here.

Android phones like Sony Ericsson Xperia Acro S and Xperia S, Samsung Galaxy Xcover and S Plus, LG Optimus L7, Nokia X, ZTE Blade III, Huawei Ideos X5 or HTC Desire S or Android tablets like Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 are among the slowest mobile devices. The iPhone 4 and iPad 2 are clearly slower than newer Apple devices and often contribute to the speed bottleneck. Out of the most popular smart phones based on the Windows Phone, the Nokia 610 and ZTE Tania have very limited download speeds. Old Symbian phones are also limited in performance.
At the moment, the mobile device market is very polarized. Out of the 150 most commonly used mobile phones, half are 4G/LTE devices that can reach at least 95 Mbit download speeds over mobile networks. Yet, about one fourth of the popular devices cannot reach 10 Mbit. A 10 Mbit download speed enables reasonably fast Internet services and smooth HD video streams. The remaining one fourth can give up to 20 Mbit download speeds, the upper limit of 3G networks.
“Quite often ordinary smart phone users fail to reach proper speeds. A device that was bought and considered fast few years ago, but also brand new devices, can contribute to the speed bottleneck. People often expect that it is the operator’s fault if the Internet connection is bad, but the device can also be the problem”, says professor Jukka Manner, who leads the Netradar development team at Aalto University in Finland.
“If a consumer wants to use fast mobile Internet, almost any LTE device is up to the job, provided that LTE is available in the area and there is no speed limitation in the data plan. The fastest mobile Internet speeds are all achieved using LTE”, continues professor Manner.
The results are based on speed measurements shared by mobile phone users using Netradar, a free mobile application to measure mobile connections and devices, available for all smart phones and tablets. When using the application, users are presented with data about the quality of their connectivity. Simultaneously, this data is uploaded anonymously to the Netradar database.
The free Netradar app measures devices and mobile network quality in terms of download and upload speed, latency and signal strength, network problems and the performance of individual brands of smartphones and tablets. Mobile device users can download the Netradar app for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Nokia X, Meego, Symbian and Jolla/Sailfish. Maps of mobile Internet speeds measured all around the world are displayed at www.netradar.org . Netradar mobile network maps can also be viewed at http://www.internetsociety.org/netradar .
So far, the Netradar app has been installed over 220,000 times. The database currently holds almost 6 million measurements from all around the globe.

References:http://phys.org/

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced that it has developed technology for web applications that run on smart devices or wearables, and that delivers the same level of security as thin clients while offering an exceptional degree of operability. In recent years, there have been increasing expectations that the use of smart devices and wearables in a variety of front-line scenarios will lead to greater efficiency in business operations. When a high degree of confidentiality is required for the data used by these devices, such as patient data or confidential company data, thin client environments, which leave no trace of the data on the devices, are ideal from a security perspective. Generally, thin clients are environments in which screen data is frequently sent and received. As a result, depending on the status of the mobile network or the processing performance on the device side, lags of up to about a second can occur, and operations that are unique to smart devices, such as swiping are effected.

Fujitsu Laboratories has now developed new virtualization technology for web applications, developed for smart devices, that automatically separates the user interface processing (UI processing) from the data processing. With this technology, data processing is executed in the cloud, and the UI processing is executed on the smart device side. As a result, new web applications running on smart devices or wearables can have a work application execution environment that is as secure as a thin client environment while achieving outstanding operability.
In recent years, the trend of using smart devices for work in a variety of settings is becoming more common. Moreover, as smart glasses and other wearables come into practical use, there are high expectations that linking wearables with smart devices will lead to greater efficiencies in business operations for people in the field (figure 1).

Technological Issues

Web applications developed for smart devices, such as cameras and sounds, for example, may use data that have been stored on the devices themselves. In addition, once data received from the cloud are stored on the devices, they may execute business logic. When a high degree of confidentiality is desired for the data used by these devices, such as in the case of patient data or confidential company data, thin client environments, which leave no trace of the data on the devices, are ideal from a security perspective. The problem with thin client environments, however, is that, depending on the status of the mobile network or the processing performance on the device side, lags of up to about a second can occur, and affect smart device operations, such as swiping (figure 2).

The Newly Developed Technology

Fujitsu Laboratories has now developed a technology that places the source code of the developed web applications on a server. When web applications are executed on a smart device, they are automatically interpreted. This technology enables processing to be distributed with data processing handled by the server, and UI processing handled by the smart device (figures 3 and 4). The features of this technology are described below.

1. Distributed web applications

A newly developed virtualization engine, run on both the device and the server, performs tasks including the transfer of UI processing and execution of processing content. In addition, a conventional web application library is replaced with a proprietarily developed web application library that supports virtualization. When the engine executes a web application, the source code is analyzed, and, by estimating the source code’s UI processing, it separates that part of the source code written in an API related to the UI defined in the library (web application library), and that is required in web application execution. Having been notified by the device executing the web application, the server sends the UI processing part of the source code and the specific web application library that supports virtualization to the smart device. By executing data processing of everything in the source code except the separated UI processing on the server side, and by executing in a distributed way on the smart device the transferred UI processing, this technology is able to maintain security while achieving a high level of operability. Because these are dynamically processed when a web application is executed, there is no need for redesign or redevelopment work for the distributed processing.

2. Distributed processing in accordance with operations

Fujitsu Laboratories also developed a feature that analyzes on the smart device the user’s operations, processing times, and frequency of operations, and dynamically transfers to the server the processes within the UI processing that have little impact on operability. The result is a secure system that also maintains a high level of operability.

The use of this newly developed virtualization technology enables smart devices to be utilized in business operations when using web applications in a mobile environment. This can be achieved with both security and the high level of operability characteristic of smart devices. In addition, by applying the technology to web applications that communicate with smart glasses and other wearables that are increasingly coming into practical use, thin client environments can be newly expanded to web applications that run on smart devices and wearables, such as for use in work that deals with large amounts of data for which a high level of confidentiality is needed.

Fujitsu Laboratories will work to improve the virtualization technology’s multiplex execution performance on servers and make its operations analysis highly accurate with the goal of practical implementation in fiscal 2016. In addition, rather than just applications for servers or storage equipment, Fujitsu Laboratories will proceed with developing technologies for distributed execution tailored to devices, network equipment, and servers in accordance with execution conditions or the network environment in order to create hyperconnected clouds, in which a variety of clouds are linked together, such as for an Internet of Things environment.

References:http://phys.org/

The Project Brillo announcement was one of the event’s highlights making news at Google’s I/O conference last week. Brillo fundamentally is Google’s answer to the Internet of Things operating system. Brillo is designed to run on and connect various IoT low-power devices. If Android was Google’s answer for a mobile operating system, Brillo is a mini, or lightweight, Android OS–and part of The Register’s headline on the announcement story was “Google puts Android on a diet”.

Brillo was developed to connect IoT objects from “washing machine to a rubbish bin and linking in with existing Google technologies,” according to The Guardian.
As The Guardian also pointed out, they are not just talking about your kitchen where the fridge is telling the phone that it’s low on milk; the Brillo vision goes beyond home systems to farms or to city systems where a trashbin could tell the council when it is full and needs collecting. “Bins, toasters, roads and lights will be able to talk to each other for automatic, more efficient control and monitoring.”
Brillo is derived from Android. Commented Peter Bright, technology editor, Ars Technica: “Brillo is smaller and slimmer than Android, providing a kernel, hardware abstraction, connectivity, and security infrastructure.” The Next Web similarly explained Brillo as “a stripped down version of Android that can run on minimal system requirements.” The Brillo debut is accompanied by another key component, Weave. This is the communications layer, and it allows the cloud, mobile, and Brillo to speak to one another. AnandTech described Weave as “an API framework meant to standardize communications between all these devices.”
Weave is a cross-platform common language. Andrei Frumusanu in AnandTech said from code-snippets given in the presentation it looked like a straightforward simple and descriptive syntax standard in JSON format. Google developers described Weave as “the IoT protocol for everything” and Brillo as “based on the lower levels of Android.”
Is Google’s Brillo and Weave component, then, the answer to developer, manufacturer and consumer needs for interoperability among smart objects? Some observers interpreted the announcement as good news, in that Google was now, in addition to Nest, to be an active player in the IoT space. Google was making its presence known in the march toward a connected device ecosystem.

Will this be the easiest platform for developers to build on? Will Brillo have the most reach over the long term? Or is the IoT to get tangled up in a “format war”? These were some questions posed in response to Google’s intro of Project Brillo.
Derek du Preez offered his point of view about standards and the IoT in diginomica, saying “we have learnt from history that there is typically room for at least a couple of mainstream OS’. But if Google wants to be the leader in this market, it needs to be the platform of choice for some of the early IoT ‘killer apps’. Its investment in Nest goes a long way to making this happen.” He added that given Google’s existing ecosystem and the amount of people across the globe that already own Android handsets, it had a good chance of taking on others and winning out.
The project page on the Google Developers site speaks about wide developer choice: “Since Brillo is based on the lower levels of Android, you can choose from a wide range of hardware platforms and silicon vendors.”
The site also said, “The Weave program will drive interoperability and quality through a certification program that device makers must adhere to. As part of this program, Weave provides a core set of schemas that will enable apps and devices to seamlessly interact with each other.”

References:http://phys.org/