Comparing Analog Front-Ends for Duty-Cycled Wake-Up Receivers in Wireless Sensor Networks

Using ultralow-power wake-up receivers (WRxs) can reduce idle listening energy cost in wireless sensor networks with low traffic intensity. This has led to many WRx analog front-end (AFE) designs presented in literature, with a large variety of trade-offs between the sensitivity, the data rate, and the power consumption. Energy consumed during wake-up in a network depends on many parameters and without a unified energy analysis, we cannot compare performance of different AFEs. We present an analysis of duty-cycled WRx schemes which provides a simple tool for such a comparison based on the energy consumed in an entire single-hop network during a wake-up. The simplicity is largely due to the fact that all network and communication parameter settings can be condensed into a single scenario constant. This tool allows us to both compare AFEs for specific scenarios and draw more general conclusions about AFE performance across all scenarios.