A Low-Power WLAN Communication Scheme for IoT WLAN Devices Using Wake-Up Receivers

In this paper, we propose a delay- and power-efficient, multi-user, low-power wireless local area network (WLAN) communication scheme for Internet of Things (IoT) WLAN devices. Extremely low-power operation is one of the key requirements of emerging IoT devices. However, the current duty-cycle-based power saving approach may incur large access delay times owing to the trade-offs between the power consumption and the access delay. In order to reduce this delay and enhance the power-saving performance, wake-up receiver-based schemes have been proposed. However, because wake-up receiver-based schemes do not consider multiuser operation in dense communication environments, large delays are inevitable in the case of multiuser operation. In order to provide extremely low-power operation and under 1-mW standby power with reduced delay, we employed the optimized multiuser transmission scheduling of IEEE 802.11ax in the proposed scheme and proper enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) parameter settings. This is with the aim to reduce the delay caused by long wake-up times, and to avoid collisions caused by simultaneous transmission in uplink multiuser scenario. By using the proposed scheme, simultaneous IoT communication with multiple mobile IoT devices is possible while providing low-power operation. Simulation results verified the outstanding delay performance of the proposed scheme.