Low-Power Ultrasonic Wake-Up and Communication through Structural Elements

Research in ultra-low energy communication for wireless sensor networks mostly focuses on radio frequency (RF). Simple, low-cost, and low-power approaches for acoustic communication are typically not explored, although in a variety of applications acoustic communication using ultrasonic waves is preferable to RF. In others, motes are already equipped with sensors and actuators for acoustics. In this work, we present a method to communicate between motes on structural elements using piezoelectric discs. We demonstrate that data rates up to one kilobit per second are achievable with only minimal additional hardware. At the same time, the energy consumption for communication is reduced compared with popular RF methods.