MH-REACH-Mote: Supporting multi-hop passive radio wake-up for wireless sensor networks

A passive wake-up radio in a wireless sensor network (WSN) has the advantage of increasing network lifetime by using a wake-up radio receiver (WuRx) to eliminate unnecessary idle listening. A sensor node equipped with a WuRx can operate in an ultra-low-power sleep mode, waiting for a trigger signal sent by the wake-up radio transmitter (WuTx). The passive WuRx is entirely powered by the energy harvested from radio transmissions sent by the WuTx. Therefore, it has the advantage of not consuming any energy locally, which would drain the sensor node´s battery. Even so, the high amount of energy required to wake up a passive WuRx by a WuTx makes it difficult to build a multi-hop passive wake-up sensor network. In this paper, we describe and discuss our implementation of a battery-powered sensor node with multi-hop wake-up capability using passive WuRxs, called MH-REACH-Mote (Multi-hop-Range EnhAnCing energy Harvester-Mote). The MH-REACH-Mote is kept in an ultra-low-power sleep mode until it receives a wake-up trigger signal. Upon receipt, it wakes up and transmits a new trigger signal to power other passive WuRxs. We evaluate the wake-up range and power consumption of an MH-REACH-Mote through a series of field tests. Results show that the MH-REACH-Mote enables multi-hop wake-up capabilities for passive WuRxs with a wake-up range of 9.4m while requiring a reasonable power consumption for WuTx functionality. We also simulate WSN data collection scenarios with MH-REACH-Motes and compare the results with those of active wake-up sensor nodes as well as a low power listening approach. The results show that the MH-REACH-Mote enables a longer overall lifetime than the other two approaches when data is collected infrequently.¹