Protocol design for ultra-low power wake-up systems for tracking bats in the wild

We present a novel concept for a wake-up system based ultra-low power communication protocol for sensor networks. The main application field is monitoring contacts and even tracks of bats in the wild. Our sensor nodes can weigh at most 2 g out of which 1 g remains for the battery. We investigate a novel communication protocol design applicable to these systems and also showing great potentials for other ultra-low power sensor networks. In particular, we investigate the bat to ground communication by combining duty cycling with a multi-stage wake-up receiver. We employ Binary Offset Carrier (BOC) modulated signals that allow to accurately localize and track the bats while transmitting data in parallel. In a first step, we evaluated the conceptual design using a software-defined radio system to demonstrate the feasibility of the protocol design.