On 12/7/07, Philip Levis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Dec 6, 2007, at 4:39 PM, Timothy J. Salo wrote:
>
>
> >
> > Do any of the 802.15.4 chips support a "wake on receive"
> > capability?  Does this capability (assuming it exists)
> > require that the radio be powered on continuously? That is,
> > does this capability power-down _only_ the processor, but
> > not the radio?  Does this capability really save enough
> > power to meet the needs of many battery-powered, hopefully
> > long-lived wireless sensor networks?
> >
>
> This doesn't work like you think it does. To hear a signal, your
> radio has to be on. The energy cost of demodulation is not the
> principal issue.
>
> Phil



Yes, to hear a signal the radio needs to be on. So "wake on receive" is hard
unless you consider dual radios. The concept of "dual radios" has existed in
theory. A second, always-on, radio can wake up the "main" radio to give you
wake on receive functionality. However, the power consumption of the
always-on second radio will cost you a lot more (in terms of energy)
compared to duty-cycling the "main" radio. Thats why dual radios with
wake-on-receive have largely remained a theoretical concept. See this work
http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~koen/papers/wakeup-radio.pdf

for a working prototype of a dual radio (EUR 5 per radio) that has
acceptable energy costs in always-on mode. The current problem, however, is
that the range of the wake-up radio is fairly small. Second problem is that
to keep the energy costs low, you will end up with a "bare-bones" radio that
is not even sophisticated enough to do addressing. You end up waking up a
lot of neighbors if you don't know how to address a particular one (don't
know if they have already solved this). Increasing the range while keeping
energy costs acceptable is an on-going work at the startup from where one of
the authors is from.

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-- 
Cheers,

Muneeb Ali | http://muneeb.org
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