Energy-efficient communication with wake-up receiver technologies and an optimised protocol stack

In the domain of distributed embedded systems, available resources regarding computing power, energy, and memory are strongly limited. With focus on the energy resources, communication hardware and communication tasks represent critical consumers for most of the common application scenarios. Accordingly, optimised approaches for the communication have to be found, including routing, topology control, and scheduling. Wake-Up-Receivers (WuRx) represent a promising approach for minimising the energy consumption in wireless communication environments. To use the conceptual benefits of such technology, an adapted communication behaviour is required. Communication paradigm, communication protocols as well as the runtime behaviour must fit together. In this paper, we introduce a WuRx-optimised routing and topology optimisation approach - WRTA. We discuss the hardware integration as well as the adaptation of the communication task scheduling on application layer. The design matching process of all these aspects allows significant improvements of the energy-efficiency in typical sensor network scenarios. For achieving these goals, WRTA represents a lightweight protocol for data-centric WSN environments. The approach combines complex route path calculations and topology optimisation mechanisms, considering a given asynchronous communi cation environment. For proof of concept, we implement several heterogeneous test benches in both soft- and hardware. Hence, the presented simulation results as well as the respective real world measurements provide interesting results regarding the scalability and the efficiency. The analysis of the data shows minimum protocol overhead and outstanding characteristics regarding scalability and robustness. We clarify that application-specific adaptations & configurations within the overall system architecture are essential to ensure an reliable communication behaviour in energy self-sufficient WuRx environments.