An Energy-Efficient Duty-Cycled Wake-Up Radio Protocol for Avoiding Overhearing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wake-up radio (WuR) system is often presented as the best candidate for replacing traditional duty cycled Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The Double Radio (DoRa) protocol is a new MAC protocol for in-band WuR system with addressing capabilities. While the DoRa protocol improves the WSNs energy efficiency, it still suffers from an overhearing problem when the WuR system is very often requested. The WuR wastes a noticeable amount of energy when overhearing to wake-up demand intended to other nodes, but it is neither measured nor solved in other works. In this paper, an adaptive duty-cycled DoRa (DC-DoRa) is then proposed to solve the overhearing problem. The primary concept of the work is to enable the WuR functionality before the node is addressed and to disable the WuR after the node sent data. Extensive simulations under OMNeT++ using real input parameters are then performed to show the significant energy-savings through the two protocols and the nearly suppression of overhearing with DC-DoRa. In fact, the mean power consumption is three-order below using the DoRa protocol compared to traditional MAC protocols. While overhearing can represent up to 93% of the WuR energy consumption with the DoRa protocol, it is reduced to only 1% with the DC-DoRa protocol.

An overview on low energy wake-up radio technology: Active and passive circuits associated with MAC and routing protocols

“…Conventionally, dutycycle MAC has been first approved in WSNs to decrease the consumed energy by working on permitting nodes sleep and wake-up cyclically. Some of the suggested duty-cycle [126] are PW-MAC [127], RI-MAC [128] and DC-DoRa [129] in order to lessen the suffering that comes from idle listening and overhearing. Idle listening, by definition, appears when a node listens to the channel to receive command messages while overhearing takes place when a node overhears the unexpected command messages for it [130].…”

MAC Protocols for Wake-Up Radio: Principles, Modeling and Performance Analysis

“…DoRa/DC-DoRa [21] is a WuR protocol which operates over two radios. For data transmission, the sink periodically sends a WuC addressed to each node, and the subsequent data transmission is performed on a separate channel.…”

“…OPWUM [20] was validated using computer simulations. Extensive simulations were performed to validate the DoRa/DC-DoRa protocols [21], showing their performance improvement over IEEE 802.15.4 and duty-cycle MAC protocols. Furthermore, ALBA-WUR was validated using a testbed.…”

“…Since Cor-WuR discards a packet after one unsuccessful attempt, P L can be obtained directly using (21), i.e., P L = α.…”

“…Then heavy packet loss occurs since there is no mechanism adopted in WuR for collision avoidance among WuCs. On [21] OPWUM [20] ALBA [6] BoWuR [17] Cor-WuR [5] Network scenario Single-hop Single-hop Single-hop Single-hop Multi-hop Single-hop Single-hop Single-and multi-hop Netw. sync.…”