Energy efficient neighborhood maintenance and medium access with Wake on Idle

The main idea of this paper is to rely only on analog channel sensing to provide integrated neighborhood maintenance and medium access control in a single mechanism for energy constrained low-power wireless sensor nodes. We propose Wake on Idle, a solution that can be implemented in the radio chip and provides these services without relying on the processor when the stable state is reached. No digital decoding is needed as we use pseudo random sequences to identify analog beacon positions in time and assess neighbors presence. Additionally, we use a code violation principle to provide medium access, ensuring that when a node wants to transmit data to a neighbor, the latter will be listening. We analyze this proposition, give some simulation results, and also provide extensive experimentation results based on an implementation running on two different hardware platforms and showing the concept to be valid, although some adaptation was needed to run on off-the-shelf radios. Even with this far from optimal initial implementation we can reach below 0.1% duty cycles for signaling periods on the order of minutes.