EXTENDING BATTERY LIFE FOR MOBILE DEVICES: 'BRAIDIO' TECH LETS MOBILE DEVICES SHARE POWER

Computer science researchers have introduced a new radio technology that allows small mobile devices to take advantage of battery power in larger devices nearby for communication.

Researchers from the College of Information and Computer Sciences, designed and are testing a prototype radio that could help to extend the life of batteries in small, mass-market mobile devices such as fitness trackers and smart watches. They hope using "energy offload" techniques may help to make these devices smaller and lighter in the future.

They have dubbed the new technology Braidio for "braid of radios," and say it can extend battery life hundreds of times in some cases.

Battery size in portable devices is proportional to their size. The larger the device, the larger it’s battery; a laptop battery is roughly a thousand times larger than one in a fitness tracker, a hundred times larger than in a smart watch, and 10 times larger than in a cell phone. However, these devices can't take advantage of the differences. For example, "the battery on your smart watch cannot survive longer by taking advantage of the higher battery level on your smartphone."

They take for granted the ability to offload storage and computation from our relatively limited personal computers to the resource-rich cloud. In the same vein, 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 researchers show that they have made strides toward fixing this problem, designing a radio that has the ability to offload energy to larger devices nearby and, in effect, making both device size and battery consumption proportional to the size of battery.

To achieve this, they embellished Bluetooth, a commonly-used radio technology, with the ability to operate in a similar manner to radio-frequency identification (RFID), which operates asymmetrically. That is, a reader does most of the work and pays the majority of the energy cost of communication, while a tag, typically embedded in a smaller device or object, is extremely power-efficient. So, when a smart watch and smartphone are equipped with Braidios, they can work together to proportionally share the energy consumed for communication.

Braidio test results show that when a device with a small battery is transmitting to a device with large battery, Braidio can offer roughly 400 times longer battery life than Bluetooth, since the smaller device's battery is preserved longer. Technologies like Braidio open up a new way of thinking about the design of mobile and wearable devices.

Thanks to: sciencedaily.com