1A Novel Wireless Wake-up Mechanism forEnergy-efficient Ubiquitous Networks
Takahiro Takiguchi, Shunsuke Saruwatari, Takashi Morito, Shigemi Ishida,
Masateru Minami, and Hiroyuki Morikawa
Morikawa Laboratory, RCAST, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Email: {takiguchi, saru, morito, ishida, minami, mori}@mlab.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Abstract—Excessive power consumption is a major problem inwireless communication. This is particularly true in ubiquitous
computing environments, since wireless devices consume a considerable amount of energy in idle listening. Wake-up wirelesscommunication technology is a promising candidate for reducing
power consumption during idle listening. To realize wake-up
wireless communication, this paper proposes a novel ID matchingmechanism that uses a Bloom filter. This paper describes thedesign and implementation of a wireless wake-up module thatuses this ID matching mechanism. Simulation results reveal thatthe wake-up module consumes only 12.4 μW while idle listening,
and that employing this Bloom-filter-based approach eliminates
99.95 % of power consumption in our application scenarios.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Toward realizing ubiquitous computing environments, many
wireless communication modules have emerged, including
cellular phones, wireless LANs, Bluetooths, and ZigBees.
These modules exchange a variety of data with each other.
Wireless technology is enhancing the mobility of ubiquitousdevices, but this mobility creates a power management problem because mobile devices do not have large power sources.
To mitigate this power management problem, it is essential toreduce the power consumption of wireless communication.
The number of ubiquitous devices is increasing dramaticallyand wireless modules always need to listen for incoming
packets from other devices. For example, a laptop PC, whichweighs 802.11g, always has to listen for incoming packets
from an access point. Consequently, wireless devices consume much power in idle listening. Achieving a low power
consumption for idle listening is an important step towards
realizing green IT.
Several studies have proposed wake-up wireless communication technologies that drastically reduce power consumption
in idle listening [1], [2]. Wake-up wireless communicationconsists of two wireless modules: a wake-up module and adata communication module.
All wireless modules exchange wake-up packets prior todata communication. A data communication module consumes
little power when it is in sleep mode. Wake-up modules canlisten for wake-up packets with energy consumptions as low asseveral tens of microwatts because they are designed to receive
only wake-up packets. The wake-up module of a receiver
node listens for a wake-up packet at the beginning of a data
communication. When the receiver receives a wake-up packet,
the wake-up module wakes the data communication module,

and the sender node starts transmitting data packets. After thecommunication has finished, the data communication module
returns to sleep mode.
Previous studies of wake-up wireless communication focus
on the implementation of a wake-up module [1] or its application to a Voice-Over-IP phone that uses Wi-Fi [2]. Pletcher
et al. implemented a wake-up wireless module that consumes
52 μW when idle listening [1]. Shih et al. implemented a“wake-on-wireless” system for Voice-Over-IP that uses WiFi [2]. They used a low-power wireless module, TR1000,
which uses the 915 MHz ISM band and consumes 7 mW
when receiving packets. These two studies demonstrate thepotential of wake-up wireless communication. In this study,
we extend these previous studies by assuming that all Wireless
Personal Area Network (WPAN) communication is realizedusing wake-up wireless communication. Consider 200 Wi-Fi
adapters on students’ PCs in a classroom, which actively scan
every 30 seconds to locate base stations. Wake-up packets for
active scanning have to wake multiple unknown access points.
If we use a broadcast address to wake the access points, thewake-up packets wake not only the access points but also the
Wi-Fi adapters on the other students’ PCs, so that the PCs
consume energy unnecessarily. We thus require a wake-up
module that wakes only specified nodes.
Such a wake-up module needs to rapidly and correctly wakethe target nodes, but it is allowed to wake few non-target
nodes. The wake-up module should consume little power. This
limitation on the power consumption places constraints on
hardware resources, such as the number of transistors.
In this paper, we propose a novel ID matching mechanism,
which uses a Bloom filter [17], for wake-up wireless communication. We designed and implemented a wake-up communication module that uses the ID matching mechanism andevaluated its performance using a circuit simulator (HSPICE[10]) and a logic simulator (Verilog-XL [12]). The simulation
results reveal that the wake-up communication module only
consumes 12.4 μW during idle listening. This paper also
proposes an ID space design that uses a Bloom filter for
the wake-up protocol. The Bloom filter is a space-efficient
probabilistic data structure that permits some false positives
but does not permit any false negatives [17]. In the application
scenarios that we consider, the Bloom filter based approach
was found to reduce power consumption by 99.95 % comparedto the power consumption when a Bloom filter is not used.
This paper is organized as follows. We describe the current

2

Data Packet

Wake-up
PacketDetectingWake-up
PacketData
Communication

Wake-up
ModuleWake-up
SignalReceiver
Data Comm
ModuleFig. 1.

Transmission energy per bit(μJ/bit)

Sender Data Comm
ModuleASK
FSK
IEEE802.15.4
Bluetooth
Wi-Fi

10
1
0.1

0.01
1

A wake-up communication scheme
Fig. 2.

state of wake-up wireless communication and the future direction of WPAN technology in Section II. We describe a designfor the wake-up module and its ID matching mechanism in
Section III and then evaluate them in Section IV. Finally, wesummarize the study and present key conclusions in Section
V.
II. M OTIVATION
A. Wake-up Wireless Communication
Current short-range wireless modules consume most power
in idle listening for receiving packets. To reduce the power
consumption for energy-constrained applications (e.g., wireless sensor networks) many energy-efficient MAC protocols
have been designed to reduce the idle listening time.
On the other hand, [1], [2] demonstrated that wake-up
wireless communication can be used as a novel energyefficient communication scheme. In the wake-up wirelesscommunication paradigm, a wireless module consists of tworeceiver modules: a wake-up module and a data communication module. Wake-up modules consume little power in idle
listening because they are designed to receive only wake-up
packets.
Fig. 1 shows a simple overview of the wake-up communication paradigm. The wake-up wireless module expends
only several tens of microwatts in idle listening, while thedata communication module remains in sleep mode, thereby
minimizing its energy consumption. When a sender nodeintends to send data to a receiver node, it sends a wake-up
packet. When the receiver node receives the wake-up packet,
the wake-up module on the receiver node wakes the data
communication module so that it can receive data packets.
Finally, the sender node sends a data packet, and the data
communication module on the receiver node starts receiving
the data packet. This wake-up wireless communication has different power consumption characteristics compared to those of
the currently employed non-wake-up communication scheme,
so that a new evaluation criterion is required for estimating energy consumption. Since the wake-up communication scheme
consumes more energy in data communication mode than inidle listening, we focus on the power consumption during data
communication, and evaluate the energy consumption in termsof the energy consumption per bit. To this end, we collected
data from as many commercial wireless modules as possible
and used it to determine approximate trends for the energy

10

100
1000
Bit rate (kbps)

10000

100000

Bit rate versus transmission energy per bit

consumption per bit. The energy consumption of wirelessmodules may change with future developments in technology,
nevertheless the measured trends should provide us with someindications about near-future wireless technology.
B. Survey of Commercial Wireless Modules
We surveyed 670 commercial wireless modules fabricatedby 64 companies and collected their specifications from theirdata sheets, including frequency, modulation, bit rate, andpower consumption (during transmission and receiving). Thisdata is downloadable from [3]. Using the extracted bit rates
and power consumptions, we examined two trends: the transmission energy per bit and the receiving energy per bit.
We excluded modules from this survey that are not for
short-range communication, such as wireless modules forsatellite communication. In addition, it should be noted thatthe extracted data are based on published data from the
manufacturers, and not on measured data.
Fig. 2 shows the bit rate as a function of the transmission energy per bit. The horizontal and vertical axes have logarithmic
scales. When multiple modules have the same modulation andsame bit rate, we plot only a single point for the module withthe lowest power consumption. A 54 Mbps wireless module
for Wi-Fi wireless module has the lowest transmission energy
per bit (0.015 μJ/bit). The plot shows that the higher bit rate
modules tend to consume less energy per bit. The receiving
energy also exhibits the same trend. The lowest receiving
energy per bit is 0.014 μJ/bit.
The above results demonstrate that complicated modulation (i.e., high-bit-rate wireless modulation) is advantageous
in terms of the energy per bit. The reason for this is asfollows. The energy consumption of a front-end circuit ina wireless module is large and does not depend on the bit
rate. Baseband circuits are more energy-efficient than front-end
circuits, because baseband circuits consist of digital circuits,
whereas front-end circuits consist of analog circuit such as RF
amplifiers and IF mixers.
From this discussion, higher bit rate wireless modules offer
more energy-efficient communication in the wake-up wirelesscommunication paradigm. The result suggests the possibilityof integrating high bit rate wireless networks (e.g., Wi-Fi)
and energy-efficient wireless networks (e.g., wireless sensor
networks).

3(1) Wake packet (Device ID)
ReceiverTransmitter
Wake-up
ModuleRadio Wave
Detector(2) Wake-up

Data Comm.
ModuleFig. 3.

ID Matching
Wake-up Module

Wake-upPreambleFig. 4.

Frame structure of a wake-up packet

Data
Communication
ModuleTwo-step wake-up wireless communication

ID 16 bit



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TABLE IP HYSICAL LAYER PARAMETERS OF WAKE - UP CHANNEL
Frequency
Modulation
Baud rate
Coding950 MHz
90%ASK≥ 40 kBaud
Manchester code

III. D ESIGN
Our wake-up module realizes a selective wake-up mechanism that reduces the idle listening power.
Fig. 3 shows an overview of the wireless communication
wake-up mechanism. The wake-up wireless communication
system consists of two RF modules: a wake-up module anda data communication module. The wake-up process consistsof two steps: the radio wave detector wakes the ID matchingcircuit, and the ID matching circuit then wakes the data communication module. This two-step wake-up process reduces
the power consumption of idle listening. The radio wave detector listens for an incoming wake-up packet. When a sendernode sends a wake-up packet, the radio wave detector wakes
the ID matching circuit. The ID matching circuit achieves
selective wake-up by extracting the ID from the wake-up
packet and comparing that ID with its own ID. If the IDs
match, the wake-up module wakes the data communication
module. Finally, the sender node transmits data packets, andthe data communication module of the receiver node receives
the data packets. The data communication module is a general
wireless module such as a Wi-Fi.
Details of the wake-up module and the ID matching mechanism are given in the following section.
A. Wake-up module1) Circuit Design: TABLE I shows the physical layer
parameters of the wake-up channel. The wake-up module uses
the 950 MHz band because of a communication distance ofseveral meters is required. The UHF band, in which 950
MHz is located, has relatively low loss, enabling longer
communication distances than other frequencies for the same
power consumption. To reduce power consumption, the wakeup module uses ASK modulation to simplify the demodulation
circuit. Since the wake-up channel does not need to send muchdata, the wake-up module communicates at a baud rate of 40
kBaud (this baud rate is referred to as the 915 MHz bandrate in IEEE 802.15.4). The payload of the wake-up packet iscoded with Manchester code because the wake-up module cancommunicate without a high-precision clock generator, which
consumes a lot of power.

Fig. 5.

Details of the preamble

2) Frame format: Fig. 4 shows the frame structure of a
wake-up packet. The frame is composed of a preamble for bit
synchronization and an ID for waking nodes.
Fig. 5 shows the details of the preamble. The top of thepreamble is not modulated and is more than 20 μs long. Not
modulating the preamble improves the detection sensitivity,
because this allows the radio wave detector to store someenergy from the preamble. Following this non-modulated
preamble, there are five or more modulated bits of 0 and astart code. The wake-up module uses four modulated bits of
0 for extracting the bit cycle, and uses the last bit for edge
synchronization. The bit cycle is derived from the average ofthe four bits. The start code is the sequence “1101”, whichindicates the start of a payload frame.
3) Hardware: We implemented a wake-up module using
the CMOS LSI 0.18 μm process rule. The supply voltage is
1.8 V, which is the same as the low-voltage technology, TSMC
0.18 μm. We referred to Refs. [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9] forthis implementation.
Fig. 6 shows the inside composition of the wake-up module.
The wake-up module consists of an analog circuit and a digital
circuit. Fig. 7 shows the analog circuit. There are 29 transistors
in the analog circuit for the radio wave detector, 20 for the
power controller, 19 for the demodulator, 14 for the clock
generator, and 5 for the resetter. The digital circuit consists ofa bit receiver, a shift register, and an ID matching circuit.
The operation of the wake-up module is as follows. (1)During idle listening, the wake-up module senses a carrier
with the radio wave detector, and turns off the data receiverwith the power controller. When a sender device sends a wakeup packet, (2) the receiver device detects the carrier and turns

Radio Wave
Detector

Power
Controller

Demodulator

Decoder

Power ON
Reset
Power Gating

Digital Logic

Wake-up Module

Fig. 6.

Power OFF Signal

ID
Matching

Wake-up Signal

Shift
Register

Data

Clock
Generator

Hardware organization of the wake-up module

Data
Communication
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DigitalCircuit simulator
MOSFET device model
Logic simulator
Logic synthesis toolStandard cell library

HSPICE [10]BPTM 180 nm [11]Verilog-XL [12]Design Compiler [13]GreePDK OSU Library
TSMC 0.18 μm [14]  $%&'()

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Analog circuit of the wake-up moduleon the demodulator, the bit receiver, the shift register, andthe ID matching circuit. (3) The device then demodulates anddecodes the wake-up packet, and stores the ID in the shift
register. After data reception is complete, (4) the ID matchingcircuit compares the received ID with the preset ID. If thetwo IDs match, the circuit wakes up the data communication
module with a wake-up signal. After receiving data, (5) thedata communication module turns off the demodulator, the bit
receiver, the shift register, the ID matching circuit, and itself.
(4’) If the IDs do not match, the wake-up module turns off
the demodulator, the bit receiver, the shift register, and the ID
matching circuit.
B. ID matching mechanism
The ID matching mechanism needs to satisfy the following
requirements:
1) have a small circuit size2) perform selective wake-up3) reject false negatives4) accept false positives
A small circuit size is necessary for ensuring a low power
consumption since if the ID matching mechanism has a large
circuit, it will consume a lot of power. Since we desire
the wake-up module have a power consumption of several
tens of microwatts, the ID matching mechanism has to be
implemented using a simple circuit.
Selective wake-up is necessary for when a sender nodeneeds to wake multiple receiver nodes. Consider 200 Wi-Fi
adaptors on students’ PCs in a classroom, which actively scan
every 30 seconds to locate base stations. Wake-up packets for
active scanning have to wake multiple unknown access points.
If we use a broadcast address to wake the access points, thewake up packets wake not only the access points but also the
Wi-Fi adapters on the other students’ PCs, so that the PCs
consume energy unnecessarily.
the rejection of false positives and the acceptance of false
negatives are necessary to achieve wake-up wireless communication. If the sender node is unable to wake a receiver node(i.e., a false negative), it causes a problem for services since
the receiver will be unaware of the sender node if it is notwoken up. However, if a sender node wakes a non-receiver
node by error (i.e., a false positive), it causes no problems forservices, although the non-receiver node does consume a little
energy.

To achieve selective wake-up, we propose a novel ID
matching mechanism that employs a Bloom filter [17]. The
Bloom filter was first proposed by B. H. Bloom and is aspace-efficient probabilistic data structure that is used to test
whether an element is a member of a set [17]. This testing
feature satisfies the requirement of selective wake-up. The ID
matching mechanism can also be implemented with a simple
circuit with a Bloom filter; the query process only uses an
AND circuit. Additionally, a Bloom filter permits some false
positives, but does not permit false negatives, thus satisfying
the above requirements for the ID matching mechanism.
We assume arbitrary agencies uniquely assign service IDs
for devices, services (e.g., base stations for wireless LAN,
communication with portable video game consoles), groups
such as a synchronized control system, routes on sensor
networks, etc. The Bloom filter on the wake-up module has
16 bits (i.e., m = 16). When a new service ID is added to
the Bloom filter, the service ID is feed to two hash functions
to obtain two array positions (k = 2). The node sets the bits
at all these positions to 1. We assume that each node has lessthan three service IDs (n ≤ 3). Therefore, we can calculate
the false positive probability p as follows:p = (1 − e−kn/m )k = 0.0138,
where m (= 16) is the number of bits in the Bloom filter,n (= 1) is the number of elements of the Bloom filter, andk (= 2) is the number of hash functions [18]. The result of
0.0138 indicates that false positives rarely occur.
IV. E VALUATION
A. Wake-up module
We evaluate the wake-up module described in Section III
by performing simulations. TABLE II shows the simulation
environment. We use HSPICE [10] for the circuit simulator
and BPTM 180 nm [11] for the MOSFET device model on
the analog circuit. We also use Verilog-XL [12] for the logic
simulator, Design Compiler [13] for the logic synthesis tool
and GreePDK OSU Library TSMC 0.18 μm [14] for the
standard cell library on the digital circuit.
We determine the idle listening power and maximum transmission range. In idle listening, the data communication
module and the digital circuit are turned off. Only the analog
circuit consumes 12.4 μW in idle listening. This is almost
the same level as the self-discharge from a 1000 mAh, 1.2
V nickel-metal hydride battery. In idle listening, the wakeup module consumes approximately 1/2300 the energy of a
CC1000, which is a low-power RF transceiver [15]. Thus, thewake-up module consumes very little energy.

5

TABLE IIIP OWER CONSUMPTION PER MODULE AND TRAFFIC
Wake-up OFF
Case 1Case 2
Case 3907.5 mW
907.5 mW
907.5 mW

Wake-up ON
BF OFF
BF ON
0.013 mW
26.3 mW 0.016 mW
60.5 mW 0.020 mW

Traffic
0.780 kbps
0.384 kbps
0.853 kbps

We evaluate the communication range of the wake-up module at a transmission power of Pt = 10 mW. To calculate thepropagating radio attenuation, we estimate the power received
at a distance r using the Friis equation:21c
Gr Gt Pt ,Pr =2 4πfc r
where c is the speed of light, fc is the frequency, Gr is thegain of a receiver antenna, Gt is the gain of a transmitter
antenna, and 1/2 is the radio attenuation in the impedance
matching circuit of the receiver. The maximum transmission
range is defined as the transmission length at which thereceiver acquires the minimum receiving power. We estimate
to be r = 3.9 m, when Pr = −36.9 dBm, fc = 950 MHz,and Gr = Gt = 0 dBi. If we apply some circuit techniquessuch as [7], the maximum transmission range can be extended
up to 10 m.
B. ID matching mechanism
We evaluate how much the ID matching mechanism canreduce the energy consumption. This simulation is basedon the wake-up module described in Section III and thesimulation results in Section IV-A for a bit rate of 40 kbps,
a power consumption in idle listening of 12.4 μW, an power
consumption when receiving the ID of 368.1 μW. We assume
that the data communication module is IEEE802.11g WLRGRA-DP101 [16], which consumes 907.5 mW when receivingdata.
In this simulation, we compare three wireless settings: notusing the wake-up mechanism (Wake-up OFF), using thewake-up mechanism without a Bloom filter (Wake-up ON/BF
OFF), and using the wake-up mechanism with a Bloom filter(Wake-up ON/BF ON). All wake-up modules sleep again 10
ms after completing data transmission.
We evaluate the settings for the following three cases:
Case1 60 nodes on a sensor network transmit sensor data
to the next node every 10 seconds.
Case2 There are 30 portable video game consoles and one
mobile router in a train, and all game players searchfor each other every 10 seconds.
Case3 200 Wi-Fi on students’ PCs in a classroom actively
scan base stations every 30 seconds.
TABLE III shows the results. In case 1, the wake-up
mechanism reduces power consumption by a factor of 1/70000
compared to not using the wake-up mechanism. There is nodifference between the wake-up mechanism with a Bloom
filter and the wake-up mechanism without a Bloom filter,because each sensor node has only one destination node. In
cases 2 and 3, the wake-up mechanism without a Bloom filter

consumes 1600 to 3000 times more energy than the wakeup mechanism with a Bloom filter, because the Bloom filter
enables the nodes to wake only the required nodes. All wakeup packet traffic is sufficiently smaller than 40 kbps, which isthe bit rate of the wake-up module. These results demonstratethat the ID matching mechanism with a Bloom filter drasticallyreduces the power consumption compared to when the wakeup mechanism is not used and when the wake-up mechanism
is used without a Bloom filter.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we have proposed a novel ID matching mechanism with a Bloom filter for wake-up wireless communication,
which is a mechanism for reducing energy consumption inidle listening. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism by simulation. The results show that our
proposed mechanism reduces power consumption by a factorof 1/70000 compared to currently used Wi-Fi. The next stepis to implement the new wake-up module and to evaluate thewake-up module in actual environments.
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