Timeline for Could data transmission power consumption be lessened by transmitting more zeroes?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
27 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 14, 2021 at 13:20 | comment | added | Mick | Why not just transmit 0s and leave gaps where the 1s would be? ... oh, wait... | |
| Jul 14, 2021 at 13:02 | answer | added | user184182 | timeline score: 0 | |
| Jul 13, 2021 at 12:06 | comment | added | JRobert | I agree that the suggested (by the OP) solution involved data compression, the question cited total power consumption. I neglected to suggest looking the components of that consumption and going after the large contributors. | |
| Jul 13, 2021 at 2:44 | answer | added | 2012rcampion | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jul 13, 2021 at 1:55 | comment | added | mmmm | ... Note, however, that an answer on putting that into perspective to the reported energy consumption would really help here, too. But also, while the "motivation" is that a lot of power goes into communication, the question is about power efficiency of modulation schemes | |
| Jul 13, 2021 at 1:54 | comment | added | mmmm | @JRobert depends, really. For example, sub-Atlantic fiber cables: the power gets wasted on the power lines lying next to the optical fiber, which are sadly necessary to pp power the amplifiers for the optical signal every couple hundred km. In a smart phone with large distance to a cell tower, the transmit amplifier will most definitely eat a good amount of your battery. In a data center, where distances are short, things nighty look different, but rule of thumb is that if you have to maximize rate, you'll have to maximize power put into the medium (slightly different for non-linear media)... | |
| Jul 12, 2021 at 20:03 | comment | added | Brian | @jwh20: The idea that zeroes require less power is not a strange intuition. Typical discussions of data transmission say things like "the digits 1 and 0 in binary reflect the on and off states in the transistor" or that "1s and 0s are just voltage levels." In both cases, a person might reasonably believe that 0s use less power than 1s. | |
| Jul 12, 2021 at 19:55 | comment | added | Reid | Commenters challenging the OP's belief that transmitting a one takes more energy than a zero should keep in mind that their intuition is based on a lot of background information the OP does not have. Yes the question is naïve but we all started out as newbies. It's a good question. +1 | |
| Jul 12, 2021 at 16:30 | comment | added | JRobert | What fraction of data-communication power is due to driving the media? Wouldn't that be swamped by the power consumption of the communication hardware at the terminals, for [de-]compression, routing, store and forward activities, etc.? | |
| Jul 12, 2021 at 14:56 | comment | added | Marcus Müller | … spectral properties. So, really, a communications without source coding is counter-productive here. In fact, this is literally the BPSK example I brought in my answer; I'd recommend going through it, I think you'll like it! | |
| Jul 12, 2021 at 14:52 | comment | added | Marcus Müller | @Mast it's not. Source coding (==compression) is not optional for many reasons, and 1s and 0s use the same amount of energy – there's no efficient schemes where they don't. You don't do the same between two transistors as you do for communications over distances! Also, we understand communication systems well enough to know that source coding uses a relatively negligible amount of power compared to what it saves in bits to be transmitted for all but data that's already been de-correlated somewhere else (e.g. cryptography), and even for that you still need to do source coding to guarantee … | |
| Jul 12, 2021 at 10:04 | comment | added | Mast | Compression would help saving energy in the transmission of the data, but would cost energy elsewhere. If your goal is saving energy during transmission though, I think it's a more viable approach than swapping 1's for 0's. | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 17:53 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Jul 11, 2021 at 15:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackElectronix/status/1414238055981068296 | ||
| Jul 11, 2021 at 14:17 | answer | added | jy3u4ocy | timeline score: 7 | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 13:41 | comment | added | Marcus Müller | @user_1818839 well, just as channel coding and digital signal processing aren't new disciplines, but we still do research on it, the same is true for material science and hardware: there's no "low hanging fruit" left, but progress is made every day; we have a lot of known physical bounds, just as well, in these domains. Can't get 0 dB Noise figures at non-zero temperatures! Can't get more efficiency out of a laser than what the solid state physics allow, can't get more directivity out of an antenna of a given bandwidth than its size permits... So, that advise isn't any easier :) | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 11:59 | comment | added | user16324 | Reducing power through coding is a known art;as Marcus says. Instead, look at the physical layer; developing a lower loss glass, or higher photon efficiency laser, or more directional (higher gain) antenna, or exploiting a less interfered-with part of the spectrum, are some possibilities for greater efficiency (and no doubt, all active research efforts) | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 11:23 | comment | added | Marcus Müller | @DamienD your intuition is a good one, see my answer. | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 11:05 | answer | added | Marcus Müller | timeline score: 47 | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 10:52 | comment | added | DamienWontContributeToAITheft | My intuition also tells me that zeros and ones must be balanced for efficient coding. If they're not, then there may be greater power savings to be made by not transmitting the redundant information at all. | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 10:46 | comment | added | DamienWontContributeToAITheft | Isn't it the transitions that use power rather than the levels per se? | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 10:38 | answer | added | Justme | timeline score: 10 | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 10:33 | answer | added | Andy aka | timeline score: 6 | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 10:13 | comment | added | Jasen Слава Україні | OOK for instance | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 10:09 | comment | added | jwh20 | What is your basis for believing that transmitting "zeros" takes less power than transmitting "ones"? | |
| Jul 11, 2021 at 9:51 | review | First posts | |||
| Jul 11, 2021 at 18:27 | |||||
| Jul 11, 2021 at 9:49 | history | asked | Fiach Reid | CC BY-SA 4.0 |