An ultra low power high sensitivity wake-up radio receiver with addressing capability

In power-limited wireless devices such as wireless sensor networks, wearable components, and Internet of Things devices energy efficiency is a critical concern. These devices are usually battery operated and have a radio transceiver that is typically their most power-hungry block. Wake-up radio schemes can be used to achieve a reasonable balance among energy consumption, range, data receiving capabilities and response time. In this paper, a high-sensitivity low power wake-up radio receiver (WUR) for wireless sensor networks is presented. The wake-up radio is comprised of a fully passive differential RF-to-DC converter that rectifies the incident RF signal, a low-power comparator and an ultra low power microcontroller to detects the envelope of the on-off keying (OOK) wake-up data used as address. We designed and implemented a novel low power tunable wake up radio with addressing capability, a minimal power consumption of only 196nW and a maximum sensitivity of -55dBm and minimal wake up time of 130μs without addressing and around 1,6ms with 2byte addressing at 10Kbit/s data rate. The flexibility of the solution makes the wake up radio suitable for both power constrained low range application (such as Body Area Network) or applications with long range needs. The wake up radio can work also at different frequencies and the addressing capability directly on board helps reduce false positives. Experimental on field results demonstrate the low power of the solution, the high sensitivity and the functionality.