Energy-efficient WLAN with on-demand AP wake-up using IEEE 802.11 frame length modulation

This paper considers a radio-on-demand (ROD) wireless LAN (WLAN) in which access points (APs) are put into a sleep mode during idle periods and woken up by stations (STAs) upon communications demands. The on-demand wake-up is realized by a wake-up receiver which is equipped with each AP and is used to detect a wake-up signal transmitted by STA. In order to reduce the hardware installation cost at STA, we advocate to utilizing wireless LAN frames transmitted by each STA as a wake-up signal. We generate a wake-up signal based on frame length modulation (FLM) where each STA creates a series of WLAN frames with different length to which the information on wake-up ID is embedded. The simple and low-power wake-up receiver extracts the wake-up ID from the received frames. In this paper, we design and develop a prototype of the wake-up receiver and propose a wake-up protocol which defines a procedure to realize the on-demand AP wake-up in ROD WLAN. We evaluate system-level performance of ROD WLAN based on our prototype and our proposed wake-up protocol, and investigate appropriate settings of parameters for our proposed FLM to achieve the required system-level performance. Our numerical results confirm that the proposed wake-up protocol with FLM achieves smaller delay than a conventional AP employing passive scanning while maintaining small probability to be falsely woken up by continuous interference. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.