Exploiting burst transmission and partial correlation for reliable wake-up signaling in Radio-On-Demand WLANs

Recent investigations show that (i) access points (APs) of wireless local area networks (WLANs) are idle during much of the time, and, (ii) an AP in its idle state without forwarding any packets still consumes a large percentage of power. Therefore, it is necessary to put idle APs into sleep so as to realize green WLANs. The problem, however, is how to quickly and reliably activate APs from sleep when nodes initiate new data flows. Aiming at realizing Radio-On-Demand WLANs, in this paper, we suggest exploiting burst transmission of WLAN frames to convey wake-up IDs from nodes to APs. Our contribution is two-fold: (i) The burst transmission prevents interfering WLAN signals from breaking in, and, (ii) We re-interpret the sequence of WLAN frames for wake-up signaling as an equivalent ID. Based on the analysis of hamming distance among equivalent IDs, we further suggest using partial correlation to reduce the error rate of wake-up signals. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is confirmed by both theoretical analysis and simulation evaluations.