Super-Regenerative Receiver Wake-Up Radio Solution for 5G New Radio Communications

Wake-up radio is a promising solution to reduce the energy wasted by mobile devices during an idle state. In this paper, we propose a new wake-up radio solution for 5G mobile devices based on a super-regenerative receiver characterized by its low cost and low power consumption and investigate how to build on the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation capability at the base station to generate optimal wake-up signals. After presenting the relevant features and limitations of super-regenerative receivers operating in different 5G New Radio (NR) frequency bands, we evaluate how the numerology, the number of resource blocks, and the quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) scheme used affect the sensitivity of the super-regenerative wake-up receiver. The results show that a 256-QAM modulation scheme, together with the highest numerology values, achieves optimal receiver sensitivity with a minimal number of resource blocks, yielding higher duty cycle pulses that also facilitate symbol synchronization tasks.