Simulation of Wireless Sensor Nodes based on Wake-Up Receivers

The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is one of the most promising solutions for the digitization in context of Internet of Things (IoT). Despite all research activities, there are still many challenges to be solved as power consumption and quality of service (QoS) for which the Wake-up Receiver (WuRx) offers a promising approach. This technology allows energy-autonomous on-demand communication hardware for continuous monitoring of the communication channel instead of the conventional radio. Since it is often not possible to create a large-scale testbed due to material costs and time, it is necessary to rely on a virtual solution. To create, test and develop a Wake-up Receiver based WSN in a controlled and reproducible manner, a software-based simulation tool is used. This work presents a comparison of the most cited simulation tools in literature regarding communication mechanisms based on Wake-up Receivers. In detail, the simulation tools MATLAB, NS-2/NS-3, OMNeT++ and NetSim are considered. Based on this evaluation OMNeT++ was chosen to develop a sensor module that replicates the functionalities of the WuRx. This module was used to demonstrate main advantages of the WuRx based communication compared to the conventional communication of wireless sensor nodes using X-MAC and B-MAC protocols. The results have shown that the WuRx approach is better than conventional MAC communication mechanisms in terms of energy efficiency and reliability.