On the RFID Wake-up Impulse for Multi-hop Sensor Networks

Abstract

Communication protocols for wireless sensor networks reduce the energy consumption by duty cycling the node activity and adopting a periodic sleeping scheduling. This approach often results in idle listening and therefore energy dissipated for listening to a channel free from packet transmitted. Duty cycling trades-off energy consumption due to idle listening and high end-to-end delay. Proposed solutions mitigate this issue for example through extra low-power radio components (wake-up radio) that listen to the radio and wake-up the node if some channel activity is sensed. These extra components also consume some energy to listen to the channel. In contrast, we propose an on-demand wake-up capability, namely RFIDimpulse, which is achieved through using an off-the-shelf battery-less RFID tag attached to each sensor node that is also provided with RFID reader capability. Because modern RFID techniques can trigger all the neighbouring tags at once or pinpoint a particular tag, RFIDimpluse provides both unicast and multicast capability. RFIDimpulse allows event-driven communication and eliminates node idle listening. 1