Duty-cycled Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols certainly improve the energy efficiency of wireless networks. However, most of these protocols still suffer from severe degrees of overhearing and idle listening. These two issues prevent optimum energy usage, a crucial aspect in energy-constrained wireless networks such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Wake-up radio (WuR) systems drastically reduce these problems by completely switching off the nodes' microcontroller unit (MCU) and main radio transceiver until a secondary, extremely low-power receiver is triggered by a particular wireless transmission, the so called wake-up call. Unfortunately, most WuR studies focus on theoretical platforms and/or custom-built simulators. Both these factors reduce the associated usefulness of the obtained results. In this paper, we model and simulate a real, recent, and promising WuR hardware platform developed by the authors. The simulation model uses time and energy consumption values obtained in the laboratory and does not rely on custom-built simulation engines, but rather on the OMNET++ simulator. The performance of the WuR platform is compared to four of the most well-known and widely employed MAC protocols for WSN under three real-world network deployments. The paper demonstrates how the use of our WuR platform presents numerous benefits in several areas, from energy efficiency and latency to packet delivery ratio and applicability, and provides the essential information for serious consideration of switching duty-cycled MAC-based networks to WuR.

The use of duty-cycling in Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols effectively helps improving the energy efficiency of wireless networks. However, while the benefits of these protocols are unquestionable, most of them still suffer from overhearing and idle listening, two issues that prevent duty-cycled systems from achieving optimum energy usage, which is a crucial aspect in specific types of wireless networks such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN).Wake-up Radio (WuR) systems have been employed recently to overcome these issues. Under this approach, the nodes' MicroController Unit (MCU) and main radio transceiver are completely switched off and only activated when a secondary, extremely low-power receiver in the node is triggered by a particular wireless transmission. Wake-up Radio systems allow for drastic energy savings since receiver nodes are only activated on-demand, maximizing their battery lifetimes. In this paper, we have modeled and simulated a real, recent and promising WuR hardware platform based on its time and energy consumption characterization. By comparing such WuR approach to B-MAC and IEEE 802.15.4, two well-known and widely employed MAC protocols, we show it effectively out-performs the conventional WSN MAC approaches in terms of energy efficiency. To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first study to include a comparative analysis for multi-hop networks based on a real WuR platform, which shows WuR systems represent an energy-efficient solution that also provides a good tradeoff between latency, packet delivery ratio and applicability..

Energy-efficient operation is a challenge for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A common method employed for this purpose is duty-cycled operation, which extends battery lifetime yet incurs several types of energy wastes and challenges. A promising alternative to duty-cycled operation is the use of wake-up radio (WuR), where the main microcontroller unit (MCU) and transceiver, that is, the two most energy-consuming elements, are kept in energy-saving mode until a special signal from another node is received by an attached, secondary, ultra-low power receiver. Next, this so-called wake-up receiver generates an interrupt to activate the receiver node's MCU and, consequently, the main radio. This article presents a complete wake-up radio design that targets simplicity in design for the monetary cost and flexibility concerns, along with a good operation range and very low power consumption. Both the transmitter (WuTx) and the receiver (WuRx) designs are presented with the accompanying physical experiments for several design alternatives. Detailed analysis of the end system is provided in terms of both operational distance (more than 10 m) and current consumption (less than 1 μA). As a reference, a commercial WuR system is analyzed and compared to the presented system by expressing the trade-offs and advantages of both systems.

Wake-up radios present a promising alternative to traditional duty-cycle approaches, by reducing overhearing and by eliminating idle listening completely. However, energy-efficient operation of the wake-up mechanism is required for the success of such systems. In particular, addressing is an important component of the wake-up procedure that can consume a significant portion of the energy required. Hence, in this paper we propose a novel energy-efficient scheme for addressing. The proposed method is called Time-Knocking (TicK), since it utilizes the time duration of the MicroController Unit (MCU) sleeping to encode an address. In this paper, it is shown through mathematical analysis that TicK is much more energy efficient compared to the two common addressing mechanisms: MCU-decoding and correlator-based addressing. For realistic performance evaluations, physical measurements are performed to extract the parameter values of each method or the parameter values from well-documented off-the-shelf devices are used. TicK enables significant energy savings, especially in environments where false addressing initiations are frequent due to interference or where multiple nodes are addressed frequently.