Development of Radio-Frequency Sensor Wake-Up with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as an Aerial Gateway

Abstract

The advent of autonomous navigation, positioning, and general robotics technologies has enabled the improvement of small to miniature-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or ‘drones’) and their wide uses in engineering practice. Recent research endeavors further envision a systematic integration of aerial drones and traditional contact-based or ground-based sensors, leading to an aerial–ground wireless sensor network (AG-WSN), in which the UAV serves as both a gateway besides and a remote sensing platform. This paper serves two goals. First, we will review the recent development in architecture, design, and algorithms related to UAVs as a gateway and particularly illustrate its nature in realizing an opportunistic sensing network. Second, recognizing the opportunistic sensing need, we further aim to focus on achieving energy efficiency through developing an active radio frequency (RF)-based wake-up mechanism for aerial–ground data transmission. To prove the effectiveness of energy efficiency, several sensor wake-up solutions are physically implemented and evaluated. The results show that the RF-based wake-up mechanism can potentially save more than 98.4% of the energy that the traditional duty-cycle method would otherwise consume, and 96.8% if an infrared-receiver method is used.

Open Lorawan Sensor Node Architecture for Agriculture Applications

“…A new approach is using autonomous drones for the readout of data loggers. A drone is used to temporary activate a communication interface of the data logger using RF pulses [20]. The short distance between the data logger and the drone enables the usage of ultra-low power RF protocols for measurement data transmission providing only a short range [21].…”

Advances and Opportunities in Passive Wake-Up Radios with Wireless Energy Harvesting for the Internet of Things Applications

“…The proposed scheme reduced the energy consumption and the carbon footprint in the nodes. In [112], the authors developed an RF-based out-band wake-up mechanism for aerial to ground data transmission. The RF is used as the wake-up channel.…”

“…From an energy perspective, the out-of-band approach is more efficient. For instance, the out-of-band channel is more suitable for the proposed concept in [112] that emphasizes opportunistic aerial–ground sensing. However, in [99,110], multiple channels are utilized for communication of the wake-up signal.…”

“…The protocol in [112] is designed primarily for wireless aerial–ground sensing network for remote environmental monitoring applications in large-scale geospatial or challenging spaces. Likewise, the ID-based enhanced WISP mote (EH-WISP) mote design in [80] is a suitable candidate for periodic (for event-triggered and nonevent-triggered) environmental monitoring applications.…”

An Oscillator-Based Wake-Up Receiver for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…WuRxs can be RF based or non-RF based, depending on the application. Most of the reported WuRxs are RF based [6]- [10], but also optical [11]- [14] and acoustic receivers have been proposed [15]- [21]. In this work a low power oscillatorbased WuRx concept is proposed.…”