WoR-MAC: Combining Wake-on-Radio with Quality-of-Service for intelligent environments

Intelligent environments (IE) leverage embedded processing and wireless communication to assist users in a variety of ways. Applications rely on low power consumption for longer lifetimes, though different applications require different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements from the MAC layer. Until now, low power has come at the cost of other QoS parameters such as latency or packet loss. This paper presents WoR-MAC, a wireless MAC protocol which allows pre-existing protocols to be combined with remote multi-node wake-ups. The protocols are embedded into Wake-on-Radio (WoR) frames, allowing nodes to sleep during periods of low activity and be woken asynchronously with a single short RF signal. After waking, nodes begin communication using the embedded MAC protocol. Once the nodes have been woken, they maintain the QoS of the original MAC, with greatly reduced power consumption. The results indicate that WoR-MAC maintains packet loss characteristics of CSMA-CA and TDMA, as well as latency after accounting for the duty cycle and collaborative parameter estimation, while reducing power consumption by up to 49%.