本文音频及原文摘自杂志The Economist《经济学人》2016年第10期，Science and Technology版块。

Powering the internet of things

Redesigning Wi-Fi may let devices communicate more easily

Mar 5th 2016

MANY prophets of information technology (IT) believe that the next big movement in their field will be the “internet of things[1]”. This, they hope, will connect objects hitherto[迄今;至今] beyond the reach of IT’s tendrils so that, for example, your sofa can buzz your phone to tell you that you have left your wallet behind, or your refrigerator can order your groceries without you having to make a shopping list. That, though, will mean putting chips in your sofa, your wallet and your fridge to enable them to talk to the rest of the world. And those chips will need power, not least to run their communications.

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[1]物联网

▷prophet ['prɒfɪt]

a  who is  to have a   which them to say what a   to  ,  about things that will  in the 预言家，先知an Old Testament prophet 《圣经•旧约》中的先知Let us  the words of the prophet Isaiah on the coming of the Prince of Peace.让我们聆听先知以赛亚关于和平之王来临的预言。

a  who  a new  of  and 宣扬者，倡导者Rousseau, that  prophet of the  卢梭，当代伟大的倡导者

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Sometimes, this power will come from the electricity grid[1] or a battery. But that is not always convenient. However Shyam Gollakota and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, think they have at least part of an answer to the problem. They propose to reconfigure[重新配置] a chip’s communications so that they need almost no power to work.

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[1]电网,电力网格

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Most conceptions of the internet of things assume the chips in sofas, wallets, fridges and so on will use technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to communicate with each other—either directly, over short ranges[1], or via a base-station[2] connected to the outside world, over longer ones. For a conventional chip to broadcast a Wi-Fi signal requires two things. First, it must generate a narrow-band carrier wave[3]. Then, it must impress upon this wave a digital signal that a receiver can interpret. Following Moore’s law[4], the components responsible for doing the impressing have become ever more efficient over the past couple of decades. Those generating the carrier wave, however, have not.

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[1]短距离;短期

[2]基站

[3]窄带载波

[4]摩尔定律

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Dr Gollakota and his team reasoned that it should be possible to separate the jobs of generation and impression. The system they have designed has a central transmitter[1] (which might be built into a Wi-Fi router) that broadcasts a pure carrier wave[2]. Dr Gollakota’s new chips then impress binary data[3] on this carrier wave by either reflecting it (for a one) or absorbing it (for a zero). Whether a chip reflects or absorbs the signal depends on whether or not its aerial is earthed[4], which is in turn controlled by a simple switch.

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[1]中央发射器

[2]纯载波

[3]二进制数据

[4]天线(是否)接地

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Not having to generate its own carrier wave reduces a chip’s power consumption ten-thousandfold, for throwing the switch requires only a minuscule[极小的] amount of current[电流]. Moreover, though Dr Gollakota’s prototypes[原型;技术原型;雏型] do still use batteries, this current could instead be extracted from the part of the carrier wave that is absorbed.

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The chips in this system, which Dr Gollakota plans to unveil on March 17th at the USENIX Symposium[讨论会,座谈会,研讨会] on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in Santa Clara[1], California can, he claims, transmit data at a rate of up to 11 megabits[2] a second to smartphones or laptops over 30 metres (100 feet) away, and through walls. Though that rate is worse than standard Wi-Fi it is ten times better than the low-energy form of Bluetooth which is the current favourite for the internet of things.

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[1]圣克拉拉（美国加利福尼亚州西部城市）

[2]Mb

*向智能手机或手提电脑传输数据速率达11Mb/s，比标准的Wi-Fi慢，但速度比低能耗形式的蓝牙速度好10倍。

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Dr Gollakota has helped found a company, Jeeva Wireless, to commercialise his research[1] and he predicts that passive Wi-Fi chips, as he calls them, will be in production in less than two years. Eventually, he hopes, the idea behind his system—of generating carrier waves centrally—might be adapted for use in mobile phones. That would mean base stations providing a carrier wave, and phone users making calls, sending text messages and connecting to the internet without constantly having to recharge their handsets[2].

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[1]将研究商业化

[2]给手机充电

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以上言论不代表本人立场。

摘自《经济学人》杂志，仅外语学习之用。

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