Multi-Hop RFID Wake-Up Radio: Design, Evaluation and Energy Tradeoffs

Energy efficiency is a central challenge in battery-operated sensor networks. Current energy-efficient mechanisms employ either duty cycling, which reduces idle listening but does not eliminate it, or low power wake-up radio, which adds complexity and cost to the sensor platform. This paper proposes a novel mechanism called RFIDImpulse that uses RFID technology as an out-of-band wake-up channel for sensor networks. RFIDImpulse is an on-demand mechanism that enables nodes to sleep until they have to send or receive packets. It relies on IEEE 802.15.4 radio to emulate an RFID reader at a sender node, and on an off-the-shelf RFID tag attached to the external interrupt pin of each sensor node. The sender can simply activate the receiver's tag before sending it data packets.