An Energy-Efficient Duty-Cycled Wake-Up Radio Protocol for Avoiding Overhearing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wake-up radio (WuR) system is often presented as the best candidate for replacing traditional duty cycled Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The Double Radio (DoRa) protocol is a new MAC protocol for in-band WuR system with addressing capabilities. While the DoRa protocol improves the WSNs energy efficiency, it still suffers from an overhearing problem when the WuR system is very often requested. The WuR wastes a noticeable amount of energy when overhearing to wake-up demand intended to other nodes, but it is neither measured nor solved in other works. In this paper, an adaptive duty-cycled DoRa (DC-DoRa) is then proposed to solve the overhearing problem. The primary concept of the work is to enable the WuR functionality before the node is addressed and to disable the WuR after the node sent data. Extensive simulations under OMNeT++ using real input parameters are then performed to show the significant energy-savings through the two protocols and the nearly suppression of overhearing with DC-DoRa. In fact, the mean power consumption is three-order below using the DoRa protocol compared to traditional MAC protocols. While overhearing can represent up to 93% of the WuR energy consumption with the DoRa protocol, it is reduced to only 1% with the DC-DoRa protocol.