Does Wake-Up Radio Always Consume Lower Energy Than Duty-Cycled Protocols?

Many recent studies anticipate that wake-up radio (WuR) will replace traditional duty-cycled (DC) protocols given its overwhelming performance superiority on energy consumption. Meanwhile, the question on whether WuR performs always better than DC protocols has not been answered explicitly. In this paper, we investigate in-depth the energy consumption performance of WuR by considering various levels of traffic load in a wireless sensor network. By comparing SCM-WuR with both synchronous MAC (S-MAC) and asynchronous MAC (X-MAC), we ascertain that SCM-WuR does consume orders of magnitude lowerenergythanDCprotocolswhentrafficloadislow.Howe ver, our numerical results reveal at the same time that SCM-WuR does not have an absolute advantage when traffic load is heavy or saturated, especially when long range wake-up call is targeted.