Time-Knocking: A novel addressing mechanism for wake-up receivers

Wake-up radios present a promising alternative to traditional duty-cycle approaches, by reducing overhearing and by eliminating idle listening completely. However, energy-efficient operation of the wake-up mechanism is required for the success of such systems. In particular, addressing is an important component of the wake-up procedure that can consume a significant portion of the energy required. Hence, in this paper we propose a novel energy-efficient scheme for addressing. The proposed method is called Time-Knocking (TicK), since it utilizes the time duration of the MicroController Unit (MCU) sleeping to encode an address. In this paper, it is shown through mathematical analysis that TicK is much more energy efficient compared to the two common addressing mechanisms: MCU-decoding and correlator-based addressing. For realistic performance evaluations, physical measurements are performed to extract the parameter values of each method or the parameter values from well-documented off-the-shelf devices are used. TicK enables significant energy savings, especially in environments where false addressing initiations are frequent due to interference or where multiple nodes are addressed frequently.