Low-Power and Low-Delay WLAN Using Wake-Up Receivers

Energy-efficient communication technologies are a key enabler for many IoT applications. Many existing communication protocols are based on duty-cycling techniques, that have an inherent tradeoff between delay and energy consumption. In the field of sensor networks, wake-up receivers have been investigated to overcome these problems and to further reduce energy consumption. We now go one step further and investigate the use of wake-up receivers in combination with IEEE 802.11 WLAN. We extend the protocol used to communicate between the access point and the client to introduce a wake-up signal. This can be implemented in a way that is fully compatible with existing wireless LAN (WLAN) standards, thus, it can be deployed gradually with little effort and no need to change existing systems. As a proof of concept and to perform first lab experiments, we developed a hardware prototype using a selective wake-up receiver and off-the-shelf USB-WLAN dongles. All experimental results are verified using an analytical model and a detailed simulation study. We show that our wake-up WLAN can provide connectivity for low-power devices with low delays and low energy consumption at the same time.