A nanowatt Wake-Up Receiver for industrial production line

Abstract

Power consumption is a critical constraint for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) since they are battery powered devices and by definition, deployed in out-of-reach environment. In real world, most WSNs application scenarios expect from wireless sensor nodes (WSns) to be often inactive and to remain idle when no communication is present. Accordingly, this inactivity is completely useless and brings nothing but wasting energy. It has been agreed that the very first scope focused on reducing the power consumption is to handle this loss. The waste of power is mainly due to the idle listening of the main transceiver. Turning it off disconnects the node from the network and makes it inaccessible. That's how the challenge is raised. To cope with that, several solutions have been conducted in the recent years. One of which, suggests using an ultra-low power radio receiver referred as Wake-Up Receiver (WuRx). Its purpose is to handle the idle listening while keeping the main radio completely off. The reason behind, is the power consumption of the WuRx, which goes up to hundred thousand times less than the main transceiver. That way, we impressively gain power and that, therefore, extends sensor nodes lifetime. Specific scenarios of WSNs such as On-demand or Event-Triggered applications are adequate candidates for WuRx. In this paper we introduce a nanowatt WuRx and we evaluate its performance when embedded into a WSn.