Published on May 6, 2017
Topic: Technology
As the internet’s grown up, more and more areas have started to be explored, especially in consumer devices. The best examples are smarthome hardware, wearable tech, and the ever-growing power of smartphones. Engineers are moving Heaven and Earth to make everyday things slightly more convenient.
What is Beamforming?
It’s a wireless technology, based around electomagnetic fields, especially WiFi. Traditionally, WiFi is radiated out in a sphere, in the same way that light emits from a lightbulb in every direction. One of the big problems of this is that it gets weak very fast as you move away from the source. Beamforming is an attempt to alleviate this.
Instead of radiating the signal out in a sphere, it locks on to one device and focuses its energy on sending the signal just in that direction. This means they can pump way more energy in just the direction that it needs to go, so the signal winds up being much stronger wherever you are.
Things that are Changing
WiFi
The first, and most obvious, is WiFi. The new WiFi standard, 802.11ac, has beamforming built into the
standard. One of the drawbacks of this standard is that is uses a higher electromagnetic frequency (5GHz) than the
previous 802.11n (2.4GHz) standard. Why
does this matter? Higher-frequency EM waves don’t penetrate through physical barriers as well as
lower-frequency ones do. Think of it this way: WiFi can penetrate through walls and bend around corners -
however, visible light, which is a much higher frequency than WiFi, does neither of these things very well.
The new WiFi standard is nowhere near as high-frequency as light, but as an extreme example, this
illustrates my point.
Using the 5GHz frequency had a lot of advantages and overcomes many of the other problems with WiFi, especially things like signal interference. Since the strength of 5GHz radiation deteriorates so much faster, they needed a technology to overcome this. Enter beamforming - by focusing the direction, it can actually produce a stronger signal, with better range, than the older standard. You can already buy routers and laptops with this capability.
Location
Traditionally, the go-to way to locate things was a process called triangulation. Basically, you record the signal strength of the thing to be located from three sources, then cross-reference that with data about the physical environment to determine location. This is how cell phones detected their location before GPS chips were adopted. However, this technique is based on the old way of doing things - sending radiation out in every direction and hoping some of it actually gets used.
With beamforming, we can determine an approximate location with just one source. Since beamforming can tell us not only the signal strength, but the direction something is in, we can tell, roughly, where something is. This is less accurate than triangulation, but the fact that it’s even approximate is a breakthrough. This means we can map the physical location of devices with just one source instead of three. This technology is already being integrated by Apple in their Apple Watch - the Apple Watch uses beamforming to detect its proximity to a paired mac and, if it’s close enough, can automatically unlock it.
Power
Wireless power delivery has been theorized for a long time. Nikola Tesla figured it out long ago. But it
was always wildly impractical and inefficient. It has efficiency problems to begin with, because the
process of generating an electromagnetic signal itself is inefficient. Add to this the fact that you’re
broadcasting that signal in all directions, with most of it not being used, and efficiency is extremely
low. Beamforming comes in here - by eliminating the waste of sending the signal in every direction,
short-range wireless charging actually becomes practical (but still inefficient compared to cables).
Beamforming is the key to truly wireless charging, which will open up new possibilities in and of itself.
There’s actually a company working on this, likely starting to sell devices in the next couple years. They’re called Energous. They’re partnered with Apple (this isn’t official, but based on Apple’s M.O. and Energous’ statements, this is all but certain), and are expected to be providing wireless charging for an upcoming iPhone. I will watch their career with great interest.
So that’s it! Beamforming is a cool new technology that’s doing a lot of cool new things, and will open up countless doors in the evolution of upcoming wireless technologies. It’ll be interesting to see what clever uses the engineers who integrate this technology will dream up.