Wake-up Radio Ranges: A Performance Study

Wake-up radio technology helps to attenuate unnecessary power consumption by allowing a node to keep its main radio off until it is woken up by a signal to an auxiliary low-power radio receiver. In this paper, we evaluate the range performance of an ultra-low power wake-up radio receiver (WuR) integrated into a wireless device suitable for wireless sensor networking deployments. We run several ranging experiments, both indoors and outdoors, where a transmitter sends wake-up sequences to a receiver positioned meters away. We measure the amount of received sequences and whether they incur errors or not. Our experiments show that for distances up to 24m indoors the tested WuR receives more than 96% of the transmitted sequences. The WuR performs slightly better outdoors, with more than 99% of the sequences being received with negligible amounts of errors.