An architecture for sender-based addressing for selective sensor network wake-up receivers

Abstract

Duty cycling has been the main concept for saving energy in sensor networks for a long time. Yet, additional overhead for synchronization and the fact that overhearing and idle listening cannot completely be prevented, motivated further research. Wake-up receiver, i.e., additional ultra-low power radios that are not switched off and can receive a so called wake-up signal, aim to fill this gap. The wake-up signal can either be a simple energy burst that wakes up all nodes in reception range or can include an address to wake up individual nodes. In this paper, we introduce a novel addressing scheme for wake-up receivers that supports broadcast, multicast, and unicast wake-ups, and which can be realized in hardware with little additional complexity at the receiver. We implemented a prototype based on a commercially available wake-up receiver to show the feasibility of our approach. We discuss the tradeoff between the length of the wake-up signal and the possible energy savings and show an application example for sending software updates to sensor nodes in an energy saving way.