IEEE International Conference on Wireless & Mobile Computing, Networking & Communication

Low-Power 2.4 GHz Wake-Up Radio for Wireless Sensor Networks

Philippe Le-Huy, Student Member, IEEE, and Sbastien Roy, Member, IEEE.

Abstract Power consumption is a critical issue in many wireless sensor network scenarios where network life expectancy is measured in months or years. Communication protocols typically rely on duty-cycle mechanisms to reduce the power usage at the cost of decreased network responsiveness and increased communication latency. A low-power radio-triggered device can be used to continuously monitor the channel and activate the node for incoming communications, allowing purely asynchronous operations. To be effective, the power consumption of this wake-up receiver must be on the order of tens of microwatts since this device is always active. This paper presents the ongoing efforts to design such a low-power receiver. Initial results indicate an average power consumption below 20 W. Index TermsWireless sensor networks, low-power hardware, wake-up radio.

I. INTRODUCTION wireless sensor network (WSN) is essentially a group of low-energy units, with limited computational and memory resources, that operate autonomously to accomplish a specific task. Current applications center mostly on monitoring and data gathering in a variety of fields such as military, agricultural, medical and environmental, as well as others. It also exhibits self-healing capabilities, gained from a dynamic and extensible network structure, allowing WSNs to cope with hostile environments, varying communication channels and limited energy supplies. Power consumption is a critical issue in many WSN scenarios where the network is expected to last several months or even years without any external intervention concerning the energy reserves. In order to extend the longevity of the network, many power-saving schemes are used. One of the simplest and most effective schemes is to simply reduce the activity level of the nodes in favor of inactive or sleep states that drastically reduce power consumption. Another way to reduce the mean power usage is to limit to the minimum the utilization of the communication device. Typical RF transceivers dissipate energy at a rate several orders of
Manuscript received May 16, 2008. This work was supported in part by the Fonds Qubcois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies (FQRNT). P. Le-Huy is with the Laboratoire de Radiocommunication et de Traitement du Signal (LRTS) at Laval Universitys Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Qubec, QC G1V 0A6 Canada (phone: 418-6562131 ext. 5661; fax: 418-656-3159; e-mail: philippe.le-huy.1@ulaval.ca).

magnitude greater than processing units and memory. It is also of interest to note that transmitting and receiving incur similar energy drains e.g. Texas Instruments CC2420 [1] draws 18.8 mA in receive mode and 17.4 mA to radiate 0 dBm. Typical WSN communication protocols operate in a synchronous or pseudo-synchronous manner to insure that nearby sensors will be awake and able to communicate at the same time [2]. Organizing and maintaining the networks schedule can be a tedious task which may represent a non negligible drain on the limited energy reserves. On the other hand, using a completely asynchronous mode of operation, where each node can wake up its neighbors to communicate, can lead to very interesting energy savings. Instead of having the network maintain a communication schedule, each node is equipped with a low power wake-up radio which monitors the communication channel continuously. When a node wishes to communicate with a neighbor, it sends a wake-up call, containing the wake-up code or address of the target to awake only the desired neighbor. For this mode of operation to be effective, the power consumption of the wake-up device must be quite low. Lin, Rabaey and Wolisz estimated that the wakeup radio must have a power consumption below 50 W to implement efficiently the asynchronous mode of operation [3]. A few realizations of wake-up radios were reported in the literature [4]-[7] but, to the authors knowledge, no complete wake-up device with a power consumption below the 50 W threshold has been reported yet. This paper presents a promising architecture for the realization of a complete ultra low-power wake-up radio. The device includes a RF detector and an address decoder. Its expected power consumption is well below the 50 W mark. The design goals and the architecture of the proposed wake-up radio are presented in the next section while section III discusses the antenna apparatus. The RF detector and the address decoder are presented in sections IV and V respectively. II. DESIGN GOALS AND ARCHITECTURE Gu and Stankovic [8] presented the following design goals for wake-up radios: Low power consumption; High sensitivity; Resistance to interference; Fast wake-up.

978-0-7695-3393-3/08 $25.00 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/WiMob.2008.54

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A. Power consumption As stated earlier, the total power consumption of the wakeup radio must be inferior to about 50 W. If not, the overall performance of the purely asynchronous communication protocol will be worse than that of pseudo-synchronous schemes [3]. It is also interesting to observe that the power consumption and the sensitivity reflect the burden ratio between the node sending the wake-up call and the one receiving it. In general, high sensitivity implies more gain in the receiving stages, which increases the power consumption. On the other hand, a lower sensitivity will, for the same communication range, imply a higher radiated power, increasing the energy drain at the transmitting node. For example, Lin et al. [9] realized an RF and solar scavenging wake-up device. While presenting really interesting performances, this scheme is not optimal for node to node wake-up because the device has to be fed a strong RF signal for a long period of time in order to trigger the wake-up. From this example, one can see that a tradeoff between the power usage of the wake-up device and of the transmitting node has to be established to optimize the energy usage of the network as a whole. B. Sensitivity To get an idea of the minimum required sensitivity, the Friis transmission equation is used with ideal transmission i.e. free space conditions are assumed. Pr the received power is given by:
Pr = Pt Gt Gr 2

(4d )2

(1)

the noise or interference. The whole point of asynchronous operations is to avoid unnecessary wake-ups thereby avoiding wasting energy. To achieve this, the wake-up call must contain an address code to identify the intended node. That way, a wake-up call will not trigger all the nodes in range when only one node is targeted. The codes have to be chosen carefully to avoid having nearby nodes with similar codes. A tradeoff has to be made between the power consumption and the ability to withstand noise and interferers. A longer address code reduces the probability of false alarms but implies longer transmit time. As mentioned before, transmission with the main transceiver is one of the most power-consuming operations a sensor can make, so the transmission time must be kept as low as possible. Therefore, the code length should be made as small as possible while keeping the probability of erroneous wake-ups below a certain threshold. This design goal also imposes constraints on the modulation used for the wake-up radio. If the modulation used is similar to the ones used by other devices in the same band, the probability of these devices interfering is greater. On the other hand, if a very simple and non-optimal modulation, like pulse width modulation (PWM), amplitude shift or on-off keying (ASK and OOK respectively), is used, the more sophisticated modulations will be perceived more as background noise than interferers and, more importantly, the receiver structure will be much simpler and its power consumption smaller. All the realizations mentioned in the introduction use a form of amplitude modulation. D. Wake-up time The wake-up device should present a quick response time in order to minimize the latency of multi-hop communications and increase the overall responsiveness of a purely asynchronous network. E. Wake-up radio architecture The proposed architecture is illustrated with a block diagram in Fig. 1. An antenna, which can be shared with the main transceiver, collects the RF signal. It is followed by the RF detector implemented with a zero-bias Schottky voltage

where Pt is the transmitted power, Gt and Gr the antenna gain on the transmitter and receiver side respectively, d the transmission distance and the wavelength of the frequency used. Assuming operation in the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band, a radiated power Pt of 0 dBm and pseudo-omnidirectional antennas at both ends (Gt = Gr 1.5 dBi), the received power Pr at the antenna is
Pr (dBm ) = 37.07 20 log d .

(2)

For a distance d of 10 meters, the received power is around -57 dBm. To receive a -50 dBm signal, the nodes have to be within 4.4 meters from each other. All in all, the sensitivity of the wake-up radio has to be better than -50 dBm to cope with non-ideal propagation conditions and to exhibit a 5 meter range, which would be acceptable for a medium density WSN. Higher gains, both at the receiver and the transmitter, could significantly increase the received power, improving the sensitivity, or the range, of the wake-up radio. This observation motivates in part the discussion of section III. C. Resistance to interference The main idea here is to avoid waking up the node by mistake. There are two possible sources of wake-up errors: 1) nodes waking up because of a wake-up call intended for another node, and 2) nodes decoding their address code from

Envelope Detector

PWM Demodulator
Comparator Address decoder Wake Up

Figure 1. Proposed wake-up radio architecture. The antenna is not necessarily dedicated to the wake-up device; it can be shared with the main transceiver. The envelope detector provides a baseband signal to the address decoder. The amplitude modulation chosen is PWM since it provides clocking information. The received information is fed to a shift register and its content is compared to the nodes address, generating a wake-up signal if theres a match.

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doubler. Impedance matching is also included in that block. Finally, the address decoder is divided in three subsystems: the amplifier stage, the PWM demodulator and the decoder, which generates the wake-up signal. The frequency of operation was chosen to be compatible with IEEE 802.15.4 compliant hardware. It is important to note that the frequency at which the antenna and the RF receiver operate is irrelevant to the address decoder which operates in baseband. So, as long as the receiver provides envelope detection, the address decoder can be used regardless of carrier frequency. A form of amplitude modulation was chosen because of the simplicity of the receiver but, instead of using OOK, binary PWM was chosen to transmit the address code for the following reasons. First of all, PWM contains clocking information which can be used to synchronize the decoder to the incoming message. That way, no independent clock generation is necessary in the wake-up device, resulting in a small yet significant reduction in power consumption, while reducing or eliminating synchronization problems. PWM generation is also fairly easy to demodulate, needing only an integrator with a reset option. Another advantage of PWM lies in the possibility to fix a certain average transmitter duty cycle. For example, if zeros are coded as 3 s pulses while ones last 12 s, both with a period of 20 s, the transmitter is emitting with a mean duty cycle of 37.5% while transmitting a balanced signal (equal number of ones and zeros). OOK also has this particularity but the mean duty cycle is fixed at 50%. This characteristic leads to energy savings when compared to phase or frequency modulations. PWM has a good resistance to additive noise since the information is encoded in the width of the pulses. The widths representing ones and zeros are, in a binary modulation, generally chosen to be quite different, so that a very large and very unlikely distortion of the pulse width is required for an error event to occur. The drawbacks of this modulation scheme are primarily its spectral ineffectiveness and self-clocking capabilities. For a fixed bit rate, a much larger bandwidth is required to provide pulses with sharp transitions. For the described application, where a low bit rate is acceptable and bandwidth is not really an issue, this is not a major disadvantage. On the other hand, the detection of false pulses, strong noise perceived as 0 pulses, can be quite problematic due to the clock generation scheme. To reduce this effect, narrow antenna and matching bandwidths can be used to minimize the received noise and narrow baseband amplifiers can be employed to decrease the noises impact at the decision point. III. ANTENNA APPARATUS As stated earlier, an appropriate tradeoff must be reached between the sensitivity of the wake-up radio, which influences its power consumption, and the power radiated by the transmitter. It is also interesting to add in this equation the

gains of both transmitting and receiving antennas, as seen in (1). Typically, pseudo-omnidirectional antennas are used in nodes to ensure adequate coverage and minimum form factor, as well as minimum driving electronics. But what if the minimization of the form factor was demoted to a secondary objective? It would open up interesting possibilities such as the utilization of multiple directive antennas or the use of beam forming. A multitude of scenarios can be imagined where the physical dimensions of the nodes are not critical. Nodes with a volume on the order of tens of cubic centimeters could be acceptable. Dust-sized nodes, in such scenarios, would be overkill. Without a great loss of generality, one can assume that during the initialization of the WSN, the nodes acquire a general idea of the direction in which their neighbors lie. With that in mind, the use of directional antennas or beamforming (BF) is interesting on many levels as discussed in [10]-[12]. For the current application, the increased throughput or better channel utilization are not the motivations to use directional communications. The idea is to focus all emitted power toward the desired node in order to maximize the received power (see Fig. 2). It relaxes the constraints on the wake-up radios sensitivity and reduces the energy cost of the transmission of a wake-up call for a given range. The antenna apparatus could be formed with directional antennas, covering the required directions. The directivity of the antennas could be exploited in transmission. In reception, a wake-up radio could be shared between the antennas or, if the power consumption of the wake-up device and the number

(a)

(b)

Figure 2. Example of wake-up call transmissions with and without directional communications. (a) Omnidirectional transmissions block the communication channel and transmit energy in unnecessary directions. (b) Directional communication focuses all the radiated power toward the intended target, reducing the required power for a given range. Multiple communications can occur in close proximity.

(a)

(b)

Figure 3. Example of antenna apparatus with (a) directional antennas with a single shared wake-up radio (WUR) and (b) beamforming networks (BFN), each with a dedicated WUR.

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of antennas are low enough, each antenna could have its own (see Fig. 3). So, even if the antenna gain is only exploited on the transmission side, the received power is increased by a few dBms. Instead of directional antennas, beamforming could be used. However, active BF requires power hungry circuits, and so is not really interesting in a WSN context. Nonetheless, passive BF constitutes a promising avenue. Fixed BF networks could be designed to generate specific radiation patterns for transmission while one of them could be pseudoomnidirectional for the reception of wake-up calls when the node is inactive. The node would simply switch between the different BF networks depending on its intentions. Again, a single wake-up device could be used for all the beamforming networks (BFN), or each directional network could have its own. The latter option is only viable with an extremely low power wake-up radio, which has yet to be built, but with the preliminary results discussed in section V, it is conceivable to use two wake-up devices and still remain within the 50 W budget. For the time being, this aspect was not fully investigated so it is not possible to evaluate the power consumption of the antenna selection mechanism or its insertion loss. Furthermore, to be able to make a fair comparison with other realizations in the literature, the power consumption of the wake-up device will not include this stage. IV. RF DETECTOR The RF detector, as seen in Fig. 4, is a zero-bias Schottky diode voltage doubler. The impedance matching is realized for operation in the 2.4 GHz ISM band with lumped reactive elements to reduce the form factor. Experimental results are presented in Fig. 5 and 6. Impedance matching was designed to maximize the power transfer for a subset of the IEEE 802.15.4 2.4 GHz channels, with a return loss of at least -10 dB for the first six channels (out of 16). It is important to note that the matching depends on the input signal strength. In Fig. 5, it is shown for an input signal of -40 dBm. For weaker signals, it remains quite similar, but for more powerful signals it degrades substantially. This does not pose any problem because, as discussed in section II.B, incoming signals will be much weaker than -40 dBm. Fig. 6 presents the output voltage curve of the envelope detector. The saturation at low levels is due to the noise level in the experimental setup while the one at high powers is due to the degradation of the adaptation and the passage to the linear region of operation of the diodes. As one can see, the output voltage is around 0.7 mV for a -50 dBm input signal and a 1 M load. The bit rate is limited by the output capacitor of the envelope detector and the input impedance of the address decoder. The capacitor is used to provide a low-impedance path at radio frequency. If its value is too small, the diodes will not be properly grounded for the RF component, reducing

VRF

Vout

Figure 4. Zero-bias Schottky diode voltage doubler used for the reception of amplitude modulated signals for the wake-up radio.
0 -5 -10 -15 -20
S11 (dB)

-25 -30 -35 -40 -45 -50 2.38 2.4 2.42

f (GHz)

2.44

2.46

2.48

Figure 5. S11 for the zero-bias Schottky diode voltage doubler with a 1 M load.
10
0

10

-1

Vout (V)

10

-2

10

-3

10 -60

-4

-50

-40

-30 P in (dBm)

-20

-10

Figure 6. Output voltage of the envelope detector versus input power with a 1 M load.

the output voltage in baseband. For the envelope detector to function adequately, it must see a large load at its output. With those two factors in mind, the bit rate cannot be very high. The values of the capacitor and of the input impedance were adjusted for a rate of 50 kbps. The output voltage for a -50 dBm input signal is around 0.13 mV with this loading. Simulation values on that order of magnitude where used to test the address decoder. If lower bit rates are acceptable, much better detection performances are possible due to the higher diodes loading impedance. This part of the wake-up device is entirely passive and therefore does not drain the power supply. V. ADDRESS DECODER As seen in Fig. 1, the address decoder contains three elements: the amplifier stage, the PWM demodulator and the comparator. All results were obtained with SPICE simulations

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using a 130 nm process simulation model from MOSIS (IBM 8RF 130 nm). A. Amplifier stage The amplifier stage (see Fig. 7) contains a cascode amplifier followed by a common-source amplifier and a Schmitt trigger. The cascode amplifier provides a gain of about 52.5 dB with a 3 dB bandwidth of 80 kHz. To provide sharper transitions and increased voltage swing to the Schmitt trigger, a common source amplifier was added. Finally, the signal is digitized with the Schmitt trigger. Out of a 1 V power supply, the amplifier stage, as well as the bias generation circuit, draws a mean current of 18 A. The output signal of the Schmitt trigger is used to feed the PWM demodulator as well as to generate the clock signal used by the rest of the circuit. B. PWM demodulator The demodulator is simply an asymmetrical inverter followed by a capacitor. These two elements are sized to provide a certain time constant for the integration of the PWM pulses. A pulse shorter than 11.5 s gives a logical zero and longer pulses logical ones. The integrator is cleared when the input pulse ends. The output of the integrator is fed to a shift register, the first component of the comparator. While the demodulator occupies a lot of surface because of the capacitor and big transistor, its mean consumption is quite low, near 0.16 W. C. Comparator The final stage of the wake-up device consists of a shift register and a logic comparator that correlates the content of the register to a given local address. The wake-up signal takes a logic value of one when the shift register contains the right address. The average consumption of this final stage is around 0.8

Figure 7. Amplifier stage of the address decoder.

W for an 8-bit address. The very low current draw of this component and of the demodulator is explained by the very low switching rate, which is equal to the bit rate since the clock is generated from the input signal. If no signal is detected, no switching occurs, resulting in an even lower consumption. For longer address codes, the size of the register has to be increased and the logic comparator modified to accept the correct number of inputs. The rest of the address decoder remains the same. D. Overall performances Simulated waveforms obtained for the decoding of a wakeup call are shown in Fig. 8. Vsource is the ideal input, 50 kHz PWM with 15% duty-cycle for zeros and 60% for ones. The amplitude of Vsource, 0.1 mV, corresponds to the output voltage of the envelope detector for an incoming signal of approximately -50 dBm. Vin is the voltage seen by the address decoder. The first order behavior originates from the capacitive load of the envelope detector. Experimentally, the

Figure 8. Typical simulation waveforms obtained when receiving an 8-bit wake-up call with the address decoder.

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noise at the output of the RF detector was measured. Its statistical properties were derived and were included in the simulations as the rapid fluctuations seen on Vin. A significant offset is introduced by the noise as it follows a Rayleigh distribution due to the envelope detection. This offset is proportional to the bandwidth seen by the receiver prior to envelope detection. Vamp1 and Vamp2 are, respectively, the output voltages of the cascade and common source amplifiers. The clock is directly the output voltage of the Schmitt trigger, Vschmitt. The inverting integrators output, Vdemod, is sampled by the first memory element of the shift register, Vq0. The wake-up signal goes to one when the shift register contains the proper code, 01101101 in this simulation. The detail of the current drawn from the voltage supply, IVdd, is shown without the switching spikes. Table I summarizes the simulated consumption of the wake-up device (8-bit address) when a noisy signal is applied to the input of the address decoder. The second set of results was obtained by applying only the noise to the input. Using longer addresses would result in a modest increase in the comparator modules power consumption. Extrapolated results indicate a 32% increase if 64-bit addresses are used. This is not surprising since longer addresses only require more low-power CMOS logic gates. The other parts of the address decoder, and their consumption, do not change. These simulation results are quite encouraging and they show that the realization of a sub-50 W wake-up radio is possible. Of course some elements necessary to the adequate operation of a real chip were not simulated, and thus their power consumption was not considered. But even if the total average power was increased by a factor of 2.5, it would
TABLE I. SUMMARY OF THE POWER CONSUMPTION FOR EACH COMPONENT OF THE WAKE-UP RADIO (50 KBPS PWM 15/60%). Average consumption with 50 kHz signal and noise ( W) 0 Average consumption with noise only (no switching, W) 0

remain below or very near the 50 W level. To provide better insight, the performances of reported wake-up radios are compared in Table II. VI. CONCLUSION A complete wake-up radio and its simulated performances were presented. A zero-bias Schottky diode envelope detector is used to receive a PWM signal. Using this signal, the address decoder generates the clocking signal necessary for the activation of the decoding circuit. The total average power consumption is under 20 W, which is a very promising result for the physical implementation. The idea of using directional communications to increase the effective sensitivity of the wake-up device was also discussed. In addition to the potential performance gains at the network level described in the literature, less energy is required to send the wake-up calls and more power is received, facilitating the decoding operations. Future works include the physical implementation of the described wake-up device. 0.13-micron CMOS technology was used because of its great availability. Other technologies will also be evaluated like finer CMOS processes and BiCMOS. The latter is interesting because the envelope detector could be integrated with the address decoder, reducing the form factor and some parasitic effects. REFERENCES
Texas Instrument CC2420 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee-ready RF Transceiver datasheet, http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/cc2420.pdf. [2] H. Karl and A. Willig, Protocols and Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks, Wiley, 2005. [3] E.-Y. Lin, J. Rabaey, A. Wolisz, Power-efficient rendez-vous schemes for dense wireless sensor networks, IEEE ICC 2004, Paris, 20-24 June 2004. [4] N. Pletcher, S. Gambini, J. Rabaey, A 65 W, 1.9 GHz RF to Digital Baseband Wakeup Receiver for Wireless Sensor Nodes, IEEE CICC 2007, San Jose, 16-19 Sept. 2007. [5] S. von der Mark, G. Boeck, Ultra low power Wakeup Detector for Sensor Networks, IEEE/SBMO IMOC 2007; Salvador, 29 Oct. - 01 Nov. 2007. [6] B. van der Doorn, W. Kavelaars, K. Langendoen, A Prototype LowCost Wakeup Radio for the 868 MHz Band, International Journal of Sensor Networks, to be published. [7] P. Kolinko, L. E. Larson, Passive RF Receiver Design for Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE MTT-S IMS 2007, Honolulu, 3-8 June 2007. [8] Lin Gu, J.A. Stankovic, Radio-triggered wake-up capability for sensor networks, IEEE RTAS 2004, Toronto, 25-28 May 2004. [9] Kuan-Yu Lin, T.K.K. Tsang, M. Sawan, M.N. El-Gamal, Radiotriggered solar and RF power scavenging and management for ultra low power wireless medical applications, IEEE ISCAS 2006, Island of Kos, 21-24 May 2006. [10] Ramanathan, R. On the performance of ad hoc networks with beamforming antennas, ACM MobiHoc2001, Long Beach, 4-5 Oct. 2001. [11] Choudhury, R.R.; Xue Yang; Ramanathan, R.; Vaidya, N.H.; On designing MAC protocols for wireless networks using directional antennas IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Volume 5, Issue 5, May 2006, pp. 477 - 491. [12] Ruimin Huang, Y. Manoli, Phased array and adaptive antenna transceivers in wireless sensor networks, Euromicro DSD 2004, Rennes, 31 Aug.-3 Sept. 2004. [1]

Receiver

Amplifiers Demodulator Comparator (8 bits) Total

18.09 0.11 0.64 18.84

17.09 ~0 ~0 17.10

TABLE II. COMPARISON OF REPORTED WAKE-UP DEVICES. [4] [6] [5] This work Type of Realization Realization Realization Simulation work Detection Complete Detection Complete and amp. only Technology CMOS Off-theBiCMOS CMOS 90-nm shelf parts 250-nm 0.13-m Frequency 1.9 0.868 2.4 2.4 (GHz) Power 65 819 ~0 ~19 ( W) Sensitivity -48 NA NA ~ -50 (dBm) Bit rate 100 0.862 NA 50 (kbps)

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