Low-Cost Wake-Up Receiver for RF Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

The existing passive wake-up receivers (WuRxs) are radio frequency identification (RFID) tag based, which incur high cost and complexity. In this paper, we study cost-effective and long-range WuRx solutions for range-based wake-up (RW) as well as directed wake-up (DW). In particular, we consider the case of an RF energy harvesting wireless sensor node and investigate how a low-cost WuRx can be built using an RF energy harvester available at the node. Experimental results show that our developed prototype can achieve a wake-up range of 1.16 m with +13 dBm transmit power. Furthermore, our empirical study shows that at +30 dBm transmit power the wake-up distance of our developed RW module is >9 m. High accuracy of DW is demonstrated by sending a 5-bit ID from a transmitter at a bit rate up to 33.33 kbps. Finally, we present optimized WuRx designs for RW and DW using Agilent advanced design system, which offer up to 5.69 times higher wake-up range for RW and energy savings per bit of about 0.41 mJ and 21.40 nJ, respectively, at the transmitter and the sensor node in DW.