Receiver design for realizing on-demand WiFi wake-up using WLAN signals

Abstract

In this paper, we design a simple, low-cost, and low-power wake-up receiver which can be used for an IEEE 802.11-compliant device to remotely wake up the other devices by utilizing its own wireless LAN (WLAN) signals. A typical usage scenario of such a wake-up receiver is energy management of WiFi device: a device equipped with the wake-up receiver turns WiFi interface off when there is no communication demand, which is powered-on only when the wake-up receiver detects a wake-up signal transmitted by the other WiFi device. The employed wake-up mechanism utilizes the length of 802.11 data frame generated by a WiFi transmitter to differentiate the information conveyed to the wake-up receiver. The wake-up receiver is designed to reliably detect the length of transmitted data frame only with simple envelope detection and limited signal processing. We develop a prototype of the wake-up receiver and investigate the detection performance of the envelope of 802.11 signals. Based on the obtained experimental results, we select appropriate parameters employed by the wake-up receiver to improve the detection performance. Our numerical results show that the proposed wake-up receiver achieves much larger detection range than the off-the-shelf, commercial receiver having the similar functionality.