Ultra Low Power Wake-Up Radios: A Hardware and Networking Survey

In wireless environments, transmission and reception costs dominate system power consumption, motivating research effort on new technologies capable of reducing the footprint of the radio, paving the way for the Internet of Things. The most important challenge is to reduce power consumption when receivers are idle, the so called idle-listening cost. One approach proposes switching off the main receiver, then introduces new wake-up circuitry capable of detecting an incoming transmission, discriminating the packet destination using addressing, then switching on the main radio only when required. This wake-up receiver (WuRx) technology represents the ultimate frontier in low power radio communication. In this paper, we present a comprehensive literature review of the research progress in wake-up radio (WuR) hardware and relevant networking software. First, we present an overview of the WuR system architecture, including challenges to hardware design and a comparison of solutions presented throughout the last decade. Next, we present various Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols as well as diverse ways to exploit WuRs, both as an extension of pre-existing protocols and as a new concept to manage low-power networking.