Wake-up receiver for radio-on-demand wireless LANs

Abstract

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.