A simple energy efficient transceiver for IEEE 802.15.4

Power saving in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been the focus of much recent research due to the fact that the nodes are usually battery-powered. Wireless communication accounts for a strikingly high proportion of the total power consumption, so we want to reduce the power consumption by adopting a low-power transceiver in the physical layer. IEEE 802.15.4 is a popular communication standard for WSNs which has many good features that can be used for power-saving. In this paper, we propose a simple transceiver for IEEE 802.15.4. It utilizes the constant-envelope feature of the offset quadrature phase shift keying (O-QPSK) signal with half-sine shaping defined in the standard to simplify the structure of the transceiver. Compared with conventional transceivers, the proposed transceiver adopts a hard-limiter rather than a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), which results in a simpler structure and lower power consumption, furthermore, the correlation operation could be efficiently implemented just by a reversible counter. The performance of the proposed transceiver is effectively demonstrated by both computer simulation and hardware test.