Power efficient networking using a novel wake-up radio

Abstract

Many protocols have been developed for the Wireless Body Area Networks, reducing the transceivers duty cycle, and the energy consumed for the communication. But, since regular transceivers use significant amount of power for idle channel listening, all of these protocols have high overhead in power consumption when sensors need to work with asynchronous events triggered from outside the network, or have long sleep modes without any operation. Therefore, we introduce a protocol that works with our ultra low power receiver to deal with these events, while the rest of the sensors can be placed into off mode. We discuss possible application of the wake up receiver (and compare it with applications that do not use it) regarding the average power consumed for communication. Results show that using our low power wake up radio has significant advantages when the sensor has long sleep times. © 2011 ICST.