Abating LPL-induced Latency with Wake-up Radio Technology: Demo Abstract

We are concerned with IoT applications where communication among resource constrained, battery powered devices exchange data wirelessly. Traditionally, these devices keep energy consumption at bay by sending their radio to sleep according to a pre-defined duty cycle (Low Power Listening, or LPL). This, however, increases data latency dramatically. In order to reduce these delays, recent research has investigated the use of wake-up radios, namely, additional low-cost, ultra-low power radios operating at a different frequency than the main radio. In this way, by spending energy comparable to that of a node in sleep mode nodes can wake up their neighbors as soon as they have a packet to send, no longer needing to wait for the neighbors to wake up. This demonstration provides evidence of how by using wake-up radios we can abate the latency imposed by LPL. We show a simple chat application where messages from Alice to Bob are transmitted concurrently between two pairs of MagoNodes++, one with wake-up capabilities and the other using LPL. For each message received by Bob, latency information is shown, along with information regarding the time when the main radio is on. This allows us to clearly quantify the advantage of using wake-up radios for faster message exchange and for shortening the time the main radio is unnecessarily on.