Wake-up-frame scheme for ultra low power wireless transceivers

In wireless sensor networks and wireless personal area networks, power consumption is one of the most important design criteria for each small device. One of the biggest power consumers in such a device, the RF transceiver, should normally always be kept powered on for possible incoming packets; this is very power inefficient. The preamble sampling scheme was proposed to enable a receiver to sample the channel only periodically with a very low duty cycle by sending a long wake-up-preamble before the data frame; this dramatically reduces the power consumption of the receiver. The paper proposes to use a wake-up-frame instead of a wake-up-preamble to optimize further the preamble sampling scheme, achieving an additional battery lifetime gain in the order of tens to hundreds percent in different topologies and traffic loads.