Ultra low power asynchronous MAC protocol using wake-up radio for energy neutral WSN

Abstract

To extend the system lifetime of WSN, energy harvesting techniques have been considered as potential solutions for long-term operations. Instead of minimizing the consumed energy as for the case of battery-powered systems, the harvesting node is adapted to Energy Neutral Operation (ENO) to achieve a theoretically infinite lifetime. Therefore, consumed energy due to communications is the critical issue to increase the system performance. In this paper, a nano-watt wake-up radio receiver (WUR) is used cooperatively with the main transceiver in order to reduce the wasted energy of idle listening in asynchronous MAC protocols where the node is waiting for potential messages, while still maintaining the same reactivity. Simulation results show that the throughput can be improve up to 82% with 53% energy saving compared to non-WUR approach of the TICER protocol. Our simulations are performed on OMNET++ with three different widely radio chips CC2420, CC2500 and CC1100 using models with measured data.