Mid Sweden University

We present the architecture of an 802.15.4 receiver that, for the first time, operates at a few hundred microwatts, enabling new battery-free applications. To reach the required micro-power consumption, the architecture diverges from that of commodity receivers in two important ways. First, it offloads the power-hungry local oscillator to an external device, much like backscatter transmitters do. Second, we avoid the energy cost of demodulating a phase-modulated signal by treating 802.15.4 as a frequency-modulated one, which allows us to receive with a simple passive detector and an energy-efficient thresholding circuit. We describe a prototype that can receive 802.15.4 frames with a power consumption of 361 μW. Our receiver prototype achieves sufficient communication range to integrate with deployed wireless sensor networks (WSNs).We illustrate this integration by pairing the prototype with an 802.15.4 backscatter transmitter and integrating it with unmodified 802.15.4 sensor nodes running the TSCH and Glossy protocols.

We present the architecture for an 802.15.4 receiver that enables battery-free operation. To reach micro-power consumption, the architecture diverges from that of commodity receivers in the following ways: First, similar to backscatter transmitters, it offloads the power-hungry local oscillator to an external device. Second, we avoid the energy cost of demodulating a phase-modulated signal by treating 802.15.4 as a frequency-modulated one, allowing us to receive with a simple passive detector and an energy-efficient thresholding circuit. We demonstrate an off-the-shelf prototype of our receiver receives 802.15.4 from a distance of 470 cm with the carrier generator 30 cm away. This range is sufficient to integrate with deployed wireless sensor networks (WSNs). We demonstrate this integration by pairing our receiver with a 802.15.4 backscatter transmitter and integrating it with unmodified commodity sensor nodes running the TSCH protocol.

The sensing capabilities of most sensor networks are fixed at the time of deployment. Adding new sensing capabilities to such networks is a costly and cumbersome process. We present Passive Sensor Tags, battery-free sensing devices that could be used to extend the sensing capabilities of an existing network. Sensor tags feature our new 802.15.4 receiver design which is suitable for micro-power operation, making battery-free tags possible. Because our tags can both transmit and receive 802.15.4 frames there is no need for any modification to the deployed hardware. We present preliminary measurements of transmission and reception range.