RF wakeup sensor for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

To break through the energy-latency tradeoff caused by duty cycling in the existing wireless sensor network (WSN), in this paper we propose a new RF wakeup sensor, which is a dedicated small RF module to check potential communications by sensing the presence of a RF signal. With RF wakeup sensor each node no longer requires duty cycling, eliminating both sleep delay and idle listening. The distinctive feature of our RF design from the existing radio sensor studies is that the RF wakeup sensor can provide the same sensitivity as the underlying RF communication module with two orders of magnitude less energy.