Receiver Design for Realizing On-Demand WiFi Wake-up using WLAN Signals

Abstract: In this paper, we design a simple, low-cost, and low-power wake-up receiver which can be used for an IEEE 802.11-compliant device to remotely wake up the other devices by utilizing its own wireless LAN (WLAN) signals. The employed wake-up mechanism utilizes the length of 802.11 data frame generated by a WiFi transmitter to differentiate the information conveyed to the wake-up receiver. The wake-up receiver is designed to reliably detect the length of transmitted data frame only with simple envelope detection and limited signal processing. We develop a prototype of the wake-up receiver and investigate the detection performance of the envelope of 802.11 signals. Our numerical results show that the proposed wake-up receiver achieves much larger detection range than the off-the-shelf, commercial receiver having the similar functionality.