On the RFID Wake-up Impulse for Multi-hop Sensor Networks

Communication protocols for wireless sensor networks
reduce the energy consumption by duty cycling the node
activity and adopting a periodic sleeping scheduling. This
approach often results in idle listening and therefore energy
dissipated for listening to a channel free from packet
transmitted. Duty cycling trades-off energy consumption
due to idle listening and high end-to-end delay. Proposed
solutions mitigate this issue for example through extra
low-power radio components (wake-up radio) that listen to
the radio and wake-up the node if some channel activity
is sensed. These extra components also consume some
energy to listen to the channel. In contrast, we propose
an on-demand wake-up capability, namely RFIDimpulse,
which is achieved through using an off-the-shelf batteryless
RFID tag attached to each sensor node that is also
provided with RFID reader capability. Because modern
RFID techniques can trigger all the neighbouring tags at
once or pinpoint a particular tag, RFIDimpluse provides both
unicast and multicast capability. RFIDimpulse allows eventdriven
communication and eliminates node idle listening.