Demo abstract: Sender-triggered selective wake-up receiver for low-power sensor networks

Abstract

Wake-up receivers can be used in wireless sensor networks to solve the problem of node synchronization in an energy efficient manner. Conceptually, the idea is to use a dedicated wake-up signal before the actual transmission over a main radio transceiver. Several ideas have been discussed in the literature on how to make such an architecture as energy efficient as possible. State of the art are multi-stage wake-up receivers that first detect a code, i.e., an ID, before powering up the main receiver and the microcontroller. We recently introduced an extension to this scheme that adds a flexible addressing functionality. With this so called Selective Wake-Up Receiver (SWuRx), the sender can decide whether it wants to wake up all nodes in communication range (broadcast), a subset of nodes (multicast), or just a single node (unicast). In this demo, we present for the first time a prototype of our developed SWuRx. The wake-up signal contains an address and a mask and is send with a Software Defined Radio (SDR). The LEDs on our prototype show the nodes address as well as the received data. If a node is woken up by the wake-up signal, this is shown to the user by turning on a light. This way the user can directly observe the effect of different wake-up signals.