This paper presents a distributed algorithm to direct evacuees to exits through arbitrarily complex building layouts in emergency situations. The algorithm finds the safest paths for evacuees taking into account predictions of the relative movements of hazards, such as fires, and evacuees. The algorithm is demonstrated on a 64 node wireless sensor network test platform and in simulation. The results of simulations are shown to demonstrate the navigation paths found by the algorithm.

Recent investigations show that access points (APs) of wireless local area networks (WLANs) are idle during much of the time and that an AP in its idle state still consumes a large percentage of power. Wake-up receivers can be used to realize radio-on-demand WLANs, activating APs from the sleep mode only in times of active data communications. A wake-up receiver, sharing the antenna (and the same ISM band) with its co-located WLAN module and exploiting RF energy detection, can be implemented at low cost and run with low power consumption. In this article, we evaluate the effect of an imperfect RF band pass filter (BPF), and suggest a new soft decision method to (i) resist adjacent channel interference leaked by BPF, and, (ii) distinguish wake-up signals from WLAN signals. Extensive simulation and testbed experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme, at a moderate cost, has good performance in delivering wake-up signals and controlling false wake-up events caused by WLAN signals.

In this paper, we introduce Radio-On-Demand (ROD) wireless LAN (WLAN) in which access points (APs) are put into a sleep mode during idle periods and woken up by stations (STAs) upon communications demands. The on-demand wake-up is realized by a wake-up receiver which is equipped with each AP and is used to detect a wake-up signal transmitted by STA. In this paper, in order to reduce the hardware installation cost at STA, we advocate to utilize wireless LAN frames transmitted by each STA as a wake-up signal to awake the target AP. The STA generates a wake-up signal by devising WLAN signal: each STA creates a series of WLAN frames with different length to which the information on wake-up ID is embedded. The wake-up receiver extracts the wake-up ID from the received frames with a simple detector which ensures its low-power operation. We evaluate false negative (STA fails to wake up the target AP) and false positive (AP falsely wakes up without an intended wake-up signal) probabilities of our proposed on-demand wake-up scheme with computer simulations. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves the false negative probability of about 10 −2 when the detection error ratio of '1' is less than 10 −3 . We also show that the false positive probability can be largely reduced by employing long WLAN frames to generate each wake-up signal. These results confirm that the proposed wake-up scheme is a promising approach to reducing wasteful energy consumed by idle APs in WLAN.

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Abstract-In this paper, we design a simple, low-cost, and low-power wake-up receiver which can be used for an IEEE 802.11-compliant device to remotely wake up the other devices by utilizing its own wireless LAN (WLAN) signals. A typical usage scenario of such a wake-up receiver is energy management of WiFi device: a device equipped with the wake-up receiver turns WiFi interface off when there is no communication demand, which is powered-on only when the wake-up receiver detects a wake-up signal transmitted by the other WiFi device. The employed wake-up mechanism utilizes the length of 802.11 data frame generated by a WiFi transmitter to differentiate the information conveyed to the wake-up receiver. The wake-up receiver is designed to reliably detect the length of transmitted data frame only with simple envelope detection and limited signal processing. We develop a prototype of the wake-up receiver and investigate the detection performance of the envelope of 802.11 signals. Based on the obtained experimental results, we select appropriate parameters employed by the wake-up receiver to improve the detection performance. Our numerical results show that the proposed wake-up receiver achieves much larger detection range than the off-the-shelf, commercial receiver having the similar functionality.