IEEE 802.11ba Wake-Up Radio: Performance Evaluation and Practical Designs

Abstract

Featuring a long operation time to avoid frequent battery replacements, highly energy-efficient radios have shown their pivotal functions for low-power and battery-driven devices in supporting manifold Internet-of-Things (IoT) services. To this end, prolific systems for highly energy-efficient radios have been widely deployed, but they impose a critical challenge of sacrificed data rates to preclude the applications that both require high energy efficiency and high data rates. Recently, this challenge has driven the concept of equipping two radio-chains on a low-power device, known as the primary connectivity radio (PCR) and companion connectivity radio (CCR). The PCR supports high data rate transmissions, and switches to the sleeping mode when no data should be received. In this case, the CCR stays awake to monitor traffic, and wakes up the PCR when data requiring to be received arrives. However, to practice such a concept, sophisticated operations in the physical (PHY) layer and medium access control (MAC) layers are required. Consequently, the IEEE 802.11 Task Group "ba" (TGba) has been formed to launch the normative works since 2017. In the normative development, the most challenging issue lies in the design of a new frame structure especially the preamble sequence, by which the CCR in a station (STA) can efficiently synchronize with an access point (AP) and the PCR can be promptly waken up when an AP wishes to transmit data to an STA. To comprehend such a crucial foundation for the next generation low-power IoT devices, this paper provides comprehensive knowledge of state-of-the-art PHY/MAC operations of IEEE 802.11ba. Most importantly, a preamble sequence design for synchronization is further proposed for the new frames supported in IEEE 802.11ba. Through comprehensively evaluating the performance of different designs (in terms of data rate configuration and synchronization sequences), we justify the outstanding performance of the proposed design in terms of the synchronization error rate and packet error rate, to satisfy the urgent demands in the normative works of IEEE 802.11ba.