Wi-Fi goes long range on new WiLo approach

The new technique could underpin smart cities and agricultural sensor networks.

For context: I'm writing on behalf of IEEE Spectrum, a technology magazine. And this article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series, in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

Researchers have developed a hybrid technology that would combine Wi-Fi with the Long Range (LoRa) networking protocol, yielding a new long-distance wireless concept called WiLo.

Where will it be used at first?

The research team has designed their proposed WiLo tech to be used on existing Wi-Fi and LoRa hardware.

The advance may find applications in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies–such as networks of long-range sensors used in smart cities or agriculture.

Demin Gao, a professor in the College of Information Science and Technology at Nanjing Forestry University in China, notes that Wi-Fi has limitations today in its range and its high power consumption.

By contrast, LoRa is based on low power requirements that yield long-range communication capabilities and is often used for IoT applications.

How does it work?

In WiLo, the two communications protocols have been combined to maximize advantages of each one, without the need for additional tech to bridge the two systems. “This reduces costs, complexity, and potential points of failure, making IoT deployments more efficient and scalable,” Gao says.

The researchers — hailing from universities in Hong Kong, mainland China, South Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as well as Intel employees in Germany — conducted their WiLo experiments using an off-the-shelf SX1280 LoRa transceiver produced by Semtech. And while the SX1280’s 2.4 GHz communications band is shared with Wi-Fi (and a host of other standards and technologies), Wi-Fi and LoRa signals are not compatible.

So the researchers developed an algorithm to manipulate the frequency of Wi-Fi’s data transmission signals to match the signals that the LoRa device uses to communicate with other devices. In technical terms, they manipulated Wi-Fi’s data multiplexing standard (called OFDM) to emulate the longer-ranged chirp signals used in LoRa’s chirp-spreading standard (called CSS).

“This enables the use of standard Wi-Fi devices to communicate over long distances using LoRa without additional hardware,” says Gao.

How long range is it?

The team tested their new WiLo approach both indoors — in a lab and hallway — and outdoors, over distances up to 500 meters. The researchers reported WiLo achieved a 96 percent successful transmission rate.

Gao says one benefit of WiLo concerns its ability to run on existing, off-the-shelf hardware. As a result, it would not require substantial deployment costs or complexity. On the other hand, one of WiLo’s limitations is the additional power consumption required for Wi-Fi devices to simultaneously handle communication and signal emulation — a problem Gao and his colleagues aim to address in future work.

What are the next steps?

Moving forward, Gao says, “To commercialize WiLo, the next steps would involve further optimization of the system to improve energy efficiency, data rates, and robustness against interference. This may require additional software development and testing across various IoT environments.”

Ensuring that the system complies with industry standards and integrating security measures for cross-technology communication are also necessary steps, Gao adds.

The team published their research last month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Communications.

This story was updated on 7 October, 2024.

This article was originally published here.