The Design of a Ultra-Low Power RF Wakeup Sensor for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs) duty cycling has been an imperative choice to reduce idle listening but it introduces sleep delay. Thus, the conventional WSN medium access control protocols are bound by the energy-latency tradeoff. To break through the tradeoff, we propose a radio wave sensor called radio frequency (RF) wakeup sensor that is dedicated to sense the presence of a RF signal. The distinctive feature of our design is that the RF wakeup sensor can provide the same sensitivity but with two orders of magnitude less energy than the underlying RF module. With RF wakeup sensor a sensor node no longer requires duty cycling. Instead, it can maintain a sleep state until its RF wakeup sensor detects a communication signal. According to our analysis, the response time of the RF wakeup sensor is much shorter than the minimum transmission time of a typical communication module. Therefore, we apply duty cycling to the RF wakeup sensor to further reduce the energy consumption without performance degradation. We evaluate the circuital characteristics of our RF wakeup sensor design by using Advanced Design System 2009 simulator. The results show that RF wakeup sensor allows a sensor node to completely turn off their communication module by performing the around-the-clock carrier sensing while it consumes only 0.07% energy of an idle communication module.