Energy Conservative Data Aggregation for IoT Devices: An Aerial Wake-Up Radio Approach

The ubiquitous deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) and the ever-evolving IoT services seek fully autonomous devices with no energy limitations. To fulfill this demand, we investigate the usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to overcome the limited battery constraint of IoT deployments in hard-to-reach locations. Specifically, we present a UAV-enabled wake-up radio (WuR) and data collection (U-WuRIoT) solution for future IoT networks. The proposed solution leverages UAVs to wake-up IoT devices from an ultralow power sleep mode by transmitting WuR signals. Upon successful wake-up, the devices use their batteries to transmit the collected data to the UAV. In this article, we present an overview of U-WuRIoT and its applications and discuss the challenges and enabling technologies toward realizing it. Candidate enablers, such as advances on wake-up receivers and UAV transmitters’ hardware, combined energy harvesting and WuR, new spectrum opportunities, energy beamforming, channel state information (CSI)-limited schemes, and UAV trajectory optimization, are outlined. A realistic experimental testbed, using a fully operational prototype implemented via off-the-shelf components, is constructed to validate the applicability of U-WuRIoT and its benefits compared to traditional duty cycling (DCY) solutions. Furthermore, a theoretical study is conducted to extrapolate the performance of U-WuRIoT in large-scale deployments. The obtained experimental and theoretical results demonstrate that U-WuRIoT can extend the lifetime of the IoT device up to three times the lifetime when DCY is applied and can reduce the false alarm rate to less than 10%. Finally, key research directions toward implementing U-WuRIoT in the 6G era are identified.