Wake-up radio ranges: a performance study

Wake-up radio technology helps to attenuate unnecessary power consumption by allowing a node to keep its main radio off until it is woken up by a signal to an auxiliary low-power radio receiver. In this paper, we evaluate the range performance of an ultra-low power wake-up radio receiver (WuR) integrated into a wireless device suitable for wireless sensor networking deployments. We run several ranging experiments, both indoors and outdoors, where a transmitter sends wake-up sequences to a receiver positioned meters away. We measure the amount of received sequences and whether they incur errors or not. Our experiments show that for distances up to 24 m indoors the tested WuR receives more than 96% of the transmitted sequences. The WuR performs slightly better outdoors, with more than 99% of the sequences being received with negligible amounts of errors.