Experimental Analysis of a Bluetooth Low Energy Wake-Up Radio Solution

Nowadays, the use of Internet of Things has became part of our daily lives and an important technology in industries. All these interconnected devices bring one major concern that is energy consumption. This need of energy is mostly due to data sensing, data processing and communications but it also comes from the high waste of energy induced by idle listening. These devices are commonly supplied by external power source and thus have very limited lifetime. All these needs are not only expensive but they are also a threat to the environment. Fortunately, many improvements have been found during the past years from improving energy efficiency to energy harvesting. One major enhancement was brought with wake-up radio technology. Thanks to radio frequency energy harvesting techniques, nodes are able to become active only after receiving a wake-up signal thus reducing idle listening and improving latency. This paper proposes a state of the art of wake-up radio technology along with the several optimizations that could possibly be applied. Then, some analysis of current microcontrollers communication performance and energy efficiency is displayed. Finally, the paper determine the limits of the practical implementation of wake-up radio technology on such devices.