Multimodal wireless sensor networks based on Wake-up radio receivers: An nalytical model for energy consumption

Abstract

Traditionally, sophisticate power-aware wake-up techniques have been employed to achieve energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), such as low-duty cycling protocols using a single radio architecture. These protocols achieve good results regarding energy savings, but they suffer from idle-listening and overhearing issues, that make them not reliable for most ultra-low power demanding applications, especially, those deployed in hostile and unattended environments. Currently, Wake-up Radio Receivers (WuRx) based protocols, under a dual-radio architecture and always-on operation, are emerging as a solution to overcome these issues, promising higher energy consumption reduction compared to classic wake-up protocols. By combining different transceivers and reporting protocols regarding energy efficiency, multimodality in WSNs is achieved. This paper presents an energy consumption estimation model that considers the behavior and performance of wakeup protocols based on WuRx in multi-hop communications under several cases instead of traditional low-duty cycling schemes. The results show that the WuRx with addressing does not significantly reduce the energy consumption compared to WuRx without addressing. In some cases, classic low-duty cycling protocols outperform WuRx based protocols, but in most cases, it is contrariwise, giving a strong motivation for considering multi-modal approaches in WSNs.