Ultra‐low power micro Wi‐Fi scattering communication device

Abstract

A Wi-Fi scatter communication method based on microcontroller unit (MCU) is proposed, and an ultra-low power micro Wi-Fi scatter communication device μWi-Fi is designed and implemented. First, according to the characteristics of the microcontroller, the software virtual modulation method and the serial communication port direct memory access (DMA) transmission method is proposed to realise Wi-Fi scattering communication. Then the MCU + exclusive OR (XOR) baseband architecture is proposed to further reduce the main frequency of the microcontroller and the system power consumption. The communication test and power consumption measurement results show that μWi-Fi can generate signals conforming to the IEEE802.11b standard, which can be received and forwarded by universal Wi-Fi routers. Its effective communication distance reaches 15 m, its communication peak current reaches 720 μA, and its standby current reaches 390 nA. Compared with traditional internet of things (IOTs) Wi-Fi devices, μWi-Fi can not only reduce the power consumption of Wi-Fi communication by 2–3 orders but also has a simple composition and low cost, which is very helpful for the rapid development of Wi-Fi IoT products.