Has Time Come to Switch From Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols to Wake-Up Radio for Wireless Sensor Networks?

Abstract

Abstract-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 (WSN). 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 custombuild simulation engines but rather on OMNET++ simulator. The performance of the WuR platform is compared with 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.

Reducing false wake-up in contention-based wake-up control of wireless LANs

“…The receiving node performs the indicated task according to the received packet and after that enters the sleep state again. A comparison is performed between duty-cycling MAC protocols and the WuR-based MAC protocol, using the parameter of a real wake-up radio [9]. The evaluations under different use cases confirm that the WuR-based MAC protocol reduces power consumption, improves packet delivery rate and reduces delay, compared with duty-cycling based methods.…”

“…In the remote wake-up control [5,[8][9][10][11][12], the wake-up latency of WLAN modules, although not clearly addressed, can be solved by letting the transmitter hold the channel via a long preamble [13]. But when using a WuR for carrier sensing at the transmitter side, the wake-up is contention-based and the wake-up latency leads to false wake-ups, which has not been studied before.…”

“…Recently, the standardization of wake-up control for WLAN module was started as well [7]. In this remote wake-up control [5,[8][9][10][11][12], usually a unique ID is used to identify a specific receiver.…”

Application of Sensors in Intelligent Clothing Design

“…14, No. 6,2018features in the first line in the table (Back, average temperature, 2s) indicates the average temperature of the back sensor within 2 seconds before the current time point is measured. Again, the sixth line (Chest, average temperature, 120s) represents the average temperature of the chest sensor within 120 seconds before the sampling point.…”

Energy Efficient Downlink Transmission in Wireless LANs by Using Low-Power Wake-Up Radio

“…As for (i), there has been much research on remote wakeup control [4,5]. The basic idea is to equip each node with a low-power wake-up radio (WuR), which is always active to accept wake-up request [6][7][8].…”