A 2.4 GHz-868 MHz dual-band wake-up radio for wireless sensor network and IoT

Abstract

Wake-up radio is an emerging technology with the ambitious goal of reducing the communication power consumption in smart sensor networks and Internet of Things. This reduction in power consumption will enable a new generation of applications which could achieve a longer lifetime than is achievable today. Wake up radios are required to work with a low power budget and should exhibit low latency coupled with high sensitivity and addressing capabilities. Typically they are combined with existing radio transceiver and power management techniques to reduce the overall communication power while maintaining the same communication performance. This paper presents a dual band (2.4GHz and 868MHz) wake up radio with the above mentioned characteristics. The dual band solution is exploited to increase the flexibility of the wake up radio, allowing interoperability with the two most common frequencies used in Wireless Sensors Networks and Internet of Things. Simulation results present a system able to exploit the two bands with sensitivity as low as −53dBm at 868MHz and −45dBm at 2450MHz. Experimental results on power consumption demonstrate the low power consumption of the proposed solution with only 1.276μW of power consumption in listening mode. The addressing is performed by an ultra low power on board PIC microcontroller with 40nW of power consumption when the wake up radio is in listening mode and only 70 μW when the data are received and parsed.