Power consumption trade-offs in short-distance wireless transceivers for sensor nodes

This paper reviews system level considerations for the design of Ultra Low-Power Radio (ULP radio) transceivers with the capability to operate at short distances (~1m) with a data rate of 1 Mbit/s and with a very low power consumption (~1 mW); the target application is a Sensor Node (SN). It is shown that under practical constraints an Ultra-Wide-Band impulse radio architecture (UWB-IR) is more power efficient than narrow-band modulated carrier approaches for the same bit-error rate (BER) performance.