Low-power receiver for wireless sensor networks

Hardware structure and MAC layer plays the most crucial role across all the layers of wireless sensor networks, because the more we get to the upper layer, the more difficult it is to find generic low-power solutions. For many wireless sensor networks without the need of constant throughput, but with strict demands of power-efficiency, nodes usually transmit rarely, the transmit energy is not the most important parameter to be optimized, while the RF receiver should normally always keep powered on for possible incoming packets, which is very power inefficient. In this paper, measures to reduce wasted energy of RF receiver are proposed. A low-power MAC protocol is designed for low-duty-cycle wireless sensor networks. Based on the low power hardware structure and low-power MAC protocol, wake-on-radio receiver consumes about 10 times less power than comparable solutions available today.