A new wake-up radio architecture for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The last decades have been really hungry in new ways to reduce energy consumption. That is especially true when talking about wireless sensor networks in general and home multimedia networks in particular, since electrical energy consumption is the bottleneck of the network. One of the most energy-consuming functional block of an equipment is the radio front end, and methods to switch it off during the time intervals where it is not active must be implemented. This paper proposes a wake-up radio circuit which is capable of both addressing and waking up not only a more efficient but also more energy-consuming radio front end. By using a frequency footprint to differentiate each sensor, awaking all the sensors except for the one of interest is avoided. The particularity of the proposed wake-up receiver is that the decision is taken in the radio-frequency part and no baseband treatment is needed.