Acoustic Wake-Up Receivers for Home Automation Control Applications

Abstract

Automated home applications are to ease the use of technology and devices around the house. Most of the electronic devices, like shutters or entertainment products (Hifi, TV and even WiFi), are constantly in a standby mode, where they consume a considerable amount of energy. The standby mode is necessary to react to commands triggered by the user, but the time the device spends in a standby mode is considered long. In our work, we present a receiver that is attached to home appliances that allows the devices to be activated while they are completely turned off in order to reduce the energy consumed in the standby mode. The receiver contains a low power wake-up module that reacts to an addressable acoustic 20-kHz sound signal that controls home devices that are connected to it. The acoustic wake-up signal can be sent by any kind of speaker that is available in commercial smartphones. The smartphones will operate as transmitters to the signals. Our wake-up receiver consists of two parts: a low power passive circuit connected to a wake-up chip microcontroller and an active micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) microphone that receives the acoustic signal. A duty cycle is required to reduce the power consumption of the receiver, because the signal reception occurs when the microphone is active. The current consumption was measured to be 15 µA in sleep mode and 140 µA in active mode. An average wake-up range of 10 m using a smartphone as a sender was achieved.

IEEE 802.11-Enabled Wake-Up Radio: Use Cases and Applications

“…In this section we provide a thorough review of the state of the art on WuR systems. Most wake-up communication solutions focus on the use of radio frequency (RF) signals [3], although there are solutions built on acoustic [4] and Infra Red (IR) [5] technologies. WuR can be classified as active or passive based on whether they require an attached power source, addressable or non-addressable based on whether a specific node or group of nodes can be specified in the WuC, and configurable or non-configurable based on whether the WuRx settings can be modified, e.g., its address or the communication settings.…”

T-ROME: A simple and energy efficient tree routing protocol for low-power wake-up receivers

“…Finally, we need to consider the cases where node m − 1 attempts to wake-up node m, and the case where node i attempts to send data to node m. These two cases are given by Equations (4) and (5) for the wake-up and communication cases, respectively:…”

“…Equations (1) to (5) are a set of linear equations, which can be solved for certain T txi and T wi for i = 1, 2, 3.…”

Exploiting Concurrent Wake-Up Transmissions Using Beat Frequencies

“…Instead, it resides in ultra-low-power listening state. Examples of wake-up receivers with addressing capability are introduced for example in [ 2 , 8 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ].…”

“…Recently, more and more wireless sensor networks [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ] have been deployed with low-power wake-up receivers. They listen permanently to the wireless channel, but have a marginal and constant power consumption.…”