Evaluating an energy-efficient radio architecture for opportunistic communication

A major challenge for wireless networks is to minimize the energy consumption in the mobile devices. This work evaluates potential performance gains of a dual-radio architecture in which a low power radio is used to wake up the primary high power radio. Our targeted domain is opportunistic communication directly between devices. We show that it can significantly reduce the energy consumption at a price of slightly decreased goodput. We also examine the effect of the MAC protocol on the performance of the dual-radio system and we point out that in dense scenarios MAC layer protocols, such as of 802.15.4, do not perform well. We observe that information on device density of an environment can be used to address this shortcoming.