Passive RF Receiver Design for Wireless Sensor Networks.

P. Kolinko, L. E. Larson

University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0407

Abstract
The design and implementation of an RF-passive
915 MHz ISM-band receiver front-end for a "wake-up" radio is
presented. The detector has a tangential sensitivity of -69 dBm,
and zero RF power consumption in standby mode. Fundamental
limits on RF performance, range data, and optimum waveform
for minimizing false detection are described.
Index Terms Detectors, microwave diodes, nonlinear detection, passive circuits, radio receivers, spread spectrum communication, trigger circuits, wireless sensor networks.
I.

1600 10-3Amp hour 1 3years = 60uA

or 76uW standby power. Part of this energy will be consumed

by the main transceiver when it wakes up, transmits and goes
to sleep. Assuming the main transceiver consumes 25 mA, and
transmits messages with a 0.lI% duty cycle, the average transmit current is 25 uA, leaving only 35 uA for the standby receiver. Recharging the battery using energy scavenging [2] is
possible, but energy obtained in this way is limited. With a
standby radio average current limit of 35uA or less, the transceiver has to be asleep when transmission is not needed, and
false wakeups have to be prevented as much as possible [3].
Several very low power transceivers have been reported [47]. To our knowledge, a transceiver described by Otis et al. [4]
has the lowest power consumption to date, as shown in Table
I. Although all of these transceivers have excellent receiver
sensitivity, according to (1), they will either need a wakeup
radio or a low duty cycle to operate over long periods of time.
The low duty cycle approach has disadvantages of high network latency [1], a need for complex protocols to achieve
synchronization, and wasted power when the transmitter activates during periods of no transmission.
To overcome these drawbacks, the concept of a wakeup radio has been proposed. The wakeup radio must minimize the
rate of false wakeups [1], and must have good sensitivity to be
useable over a sufficiently large RF communication range [3].

INTRODUCTION

Wireless sensor networks (WSN's) consist of a large number of nodes, which sense the properties of their physical environment in a distributed geographic area and communicate
their information wirelessly. A typical application requires
deployment of nodes over long periods of time, often years,
without possibility of replacement or recharging, which makes
minimum power consumption a major design consideration.
The transceiver must remain in deep sleep when communication is not needed to minimize power consumption. Two
approaches to minimize power consumption are to either operate the transceiver on a short duty cycle, or to have an ultralow power standby receiver circuit that immediately wakes up
the main transceiver upon detecting a "wake-up" signal.
A wake-up radio has major advantages over a sleep/wakeup
duty cycle approach with respect to both power dissipation
and latency [1]. The main challenges in implementing an "always online" wakeup circuit are prevention of false wakeups
and maximizing signal sensitivity while consuming minimal

TABLE

power.

Ref

In this paper we present an ISM-band passive wakeup circuit design based on a square-law diode detector. Waveforms
designed for minimizing false wake-up of the circuit are discussed. Measured results demonstrate that properly designed
passive detectors are well-suited for implementing a robust
wakeup radio.
II.

4
5-6
7
8

STANDBY POWER CONSUMPTION CONSIDERATIONS

567

I: PREVIOUS

Circuit
Type
Transcv
Transcv
Transcv

Wakeup

This
Work

As an example of the constraints involved in sensor network

design, we assume that the lifetime goal for a network node
without recharging is three years. If the source is a 1600mAh
battery [1], which typically stores 2 WHr, the average current
drawn needs to be:

1-4244-0688-9/07/$20.00 2007 IEEE

(1)

RESULTS: TRANSCEIVERS AND WAKEUP RADIOS

Band

Rx Tx

Receiver
Sensitivity
in dBm

400uW I 1.6mW
1mW / 24mW*
1.2mW / 1.3mW

-100.5
-95
-94

1.9GHz
434MHz

Power
Consumption

40uW
0 on RF side,
Anticipated IF

consumption
20uW

1OdBm output power.

900MHz
?

-69

916MHz

AI

RX

RE
Detector
RF passive

Baseband
detector

Message
decoder
~~9

BPF

ALogic
Wakeup

Square-law
diode

Freq. Hopped

Signal

Signal

%-,~

Low frequency, low power

wk

wkAw

wz

wkAw

00

Fig. 1:

Frequency

Block diagram of proposed wake-up radio for WSN.

Fig. 2: When an AM signal with frequency hopped carrier passes

through a square-law detector, the IF output is dependent on AM
only, and is independent of frequency hopping.

A three-stage wakeup radio circuit was reported in [8] consuming 4OuW at 50kB/s data rate. Its first stage required a
powerful burst of RF energy, which was passively rectified to
trigger a timer for the second stage which detected and decoded addresses. The main transceiver could wake up only
after the address had been confirmed. The range and sensitivity of the radio were not reported.
We propose a wakeup radio, with a fully passive RF stage
as shown in Figure 1. This design eliminates active RF components, which consume substantial power, while retaining the
ability to receive messages. All amplification and processing
takes place after the signal has been passively down-converted
to lower frequencies. We discuss design techniques to minimize some of the well-known disadvantages of this approach,
while maintaining ultra-low power dissipation.

modulation frequency (455 kHz in this case), F is the AM

modulation index, and Ac is the amplitude.
When (2) is processed by a square-law detector, the output
signal contains a 455 kHz IF carrier component modulated by
OOK data (Ac(t)). The downconverted IF signal can be easily
separated by a narrowband filter from other components and
interference sources and then amplified by low frequency amplifiers to a level sufficient for processing by low power logic
circuits. The detector sensitivity is optimized when the AM
modulation index F is set to unity.
Although waveform (2) is not bandwidth efficient, it may
find practical use in the low data rate wakeup radios. Its advantages result from the fact that the transmitted power can be
large (+3OdBm or larger), since it meets the ISM band spread
spectrum requirements, and the receiver is insensitive to any
interfering amplitude modulation not centered at 455 kHz.
On the other hand, any interfering signal not rejected by the
front-end BPF at the detector input will increase the noise
floor of the detector output in proportion to the power of the
interfering signal, which is a well-known problem of all
nonlinear detectors [10].

III. OPTIMUM MODULATION CONSIDERATIONS FOR WAKE-UP

RADIO COMMUNICATIONS

Wireless sensor networks operating in the 902-928 MHz

ISM band must remain insensitive to out-of-band interference
and at the same time exhibit high sensitivity to low-level inband signals. Traditional radio front-ends employ linear mixing of the received signal with a spectrally pure local oscillator
(LO), followed by a filter to obtain the desired signals. Unfortunately, the LO consumes considerable dc power and requires
a significant "wake-up" time, which further adds to the overall
power consumption. By contrast, diode detection circuits consume no dc power, and turn on quickly. But they are susceptible to interference, and their performance in a low SNR environment is poor.
FCC section 15.247 [9] allows a high transmitter EIRP in
the 915 MHz ISM band if the transmitter employs some form
of spread spectrum modulation, such as frequency hopping
(FHSS) or direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS). This corresponds to distributing +30 dBm output power uniformly
over a minimum 500-kHz bandwidth. A square-law detector is
insensitive to carrier frequency changes and therefore can receive a FHSS signal as shown in Fig. 2.
We propose a signal of the form:
x(t) = Ac (t)(1 + ,/ cos(co t)) cos ((co +

(t)) t)

IV. DETECTOR SENSITIVITY AND RECEIVER DESIGN

OPTIMIZED FOR WAKE-UP RADIOS

Tangential sensitivity (TSS) of a detector is commonly defined as the RF signal input power at which the detector output SNR is +8dB, so that the peak output signal voltage is
roughly 2.5 times the output rms noise voltage [11]. Assuming
that the output noise of the diode is dominated by the junction
resistance the detector TSS can be calculated as:

TSS=

2.5 |4kT R B

2'

(3)

Our design employed a diode with a matched RF responsivity of 4OmV/uW at 915MHz and -57dBm tangential sensitivity at 2 MHz video bandwidth [12]. Given the diode junction
resistance of RJ 8.2k, (3) gives TSS -60 dBm, which is
within 3dB of the value measured by the vendor. In our case,
the video bandwidth was reduced to 6 kHz and ywas measured to be 5OmV/uW.

(2)

where wc is the carrier frequency, w11 is the pseudo-random

frequency offset representing spread spectrum, Wm is the AM

568

BPF, 916MHz

fc = 916.5 MHz, PTX= +20dbm, AM 455kHz,

= 100%, + FM spread spectrum

BPF, 455kHz
8.2 k

JF

RF

Vin

TX

t
68pF1

Zin

2k

3dBiMT20
R

Fig. 3:

Block diagram of the passive RF front end.

With these parameters, the TSS calculated from (3) is -73.5

dBm, which is in good agreement with the measured value of
-69dBm.
A simplified schematic of the passive RF front end is shown
in Fig. 3. The IF output readily interfaces to high impedance
amplifiers and logic circuits, allowing low power consumption
in baseband stages. The SAW filter on the RF input offered
excellent suppression of out of band interferers, but had a
rather high 4.5dB insertion loss. A small 68pF capacitor immediately after the diode suppressed RF signal components.
When (2) is received by the detector, it will contain an IF
component at Lim/2ir or 455 kHz of the form:

XI (t) oc AC (t).

/3.

COS(Cmt)

RXRE
Detector MT8220A

Fig. 4: Experimental setup used to measure SNR and received

power as range R was varied.

350ft of range. At this range our detector circuit had 15dB

SNR, sufficient for OOK digital signal reception with an estimated BER of 10-4. With a +30 dBm output power, as allowed
by ISM standards, and assuming a propagation loss exponent
of 3.3 the range would increase to roughly 700 ft.
According to the Friis power transmission equation [14] the
receiver power is calculated as:

Pp = PTx +2G+L+PL

(5)

Where PTX is transmit power in dB, G is the gain of the TX

and RX antennas in dB, L is system loss, PL is path loss in
dB, and X is the RF carrier wavelength.
Theory and measurements indicate that average received
power in dB decreases logarithmically with distance. To
model the path loss, we use a double regression model [1516], which is a practical model for the 2-ray flat earth ground
reflection.

(4)

and the rest of the components would be filtered by the narrow

band IF filter centered at 455 kHz with 3dB bandwidth of 6
kHz. The narrow bandwidth of 6 kHz provided high frequency
selectivity and SNR improvement of the detector. We used a
transformer to match the output impedance of the diode to the
input impedance of the IF filter.
V. RANGE, SNR, AND SENSITIVITY MEASUREMENTS

10On Iog(d)+al fordo <d<dF

PL(d) ljOn2
=

To evaluate the receiver performance in a high interference

environment, we performed measurements outdoors at UCSD
and measured the output SNR as a function of received power
and range. A local paging band at 929-931MHz produced a
large interference signal of -40dbm at the receiver antenna,
which the SAW filter suppressed by 25dB to -65dBm.
Fig. 4 shows the test setup; both transmitter and receiver
used 2dBi omni-directional antennas [13]. During the tests the
RX antenna was initially connected to the reference receiver
REF, and output power was measured; then it was connected
to the detector and its output SNR was measured.
The transmitter output power was set at +2OdBm 10 dB
lower than ISM limits to minimize interference with other
nearby systems during the initial evaluation. The carrier frequency was set to 916.5MHz. To illustrate suitability of the
circuit for spread spectrum communication techniques, the
carrier frequency was FM modulated so that /2n varied +
500 kHz at a rate of 1OOHz. The AM modulation index D was
set at 1.0 and the IF was 455kHz.
Antenna output power measured as a function of distance
between transmitter and receiver is shown in Fig. 6 where the
received power of-62dBm corresponds to approximately

log(d)a+a2 for d > dF

J(6)

n1 1.68, n2=3.26, al=30.9, a2=3.6

As seen in Figure 5, for distances closer than the Fresnel
zone distance dF the path loss exponent n, is 1.7, whereas for
larger distances the path loss exponent n2 is 3.3. The Fresnel
zone can be approximated as [15]
df

16hh2 -A2(h2 +hR2 ) +

1616

_4

(7)

Where h1 and hR are elevations of the TX and RX antennas

above ground and X is the RF carrier wavelength. In our experiment, X = 0.3m and hT = hR = 1.05m. From (7) dF is calculated to be 10 meters, and 10*log(33) = 15, which is in excellent agreement with measured data in Figure 5.
It is interesting to note that small improvements in sensitivity provide very limited improvement in the range of WSN
nodes, because of the transition to n = 3.3 beyond the Fresnel
distance of 10 meters, as the received power begins to roll-off
at 33dB per decade of distance. In [16], somewhat smaller
Fresnel distances of 6m, 3m and Im were reported, due to the
antennas being located very close to ground.

569

From this we can conclude that communication range of

wakeup radios based on detector diodes cannot be significantly extended beyond what has been presented in this paper,
without large improvements in sensitivity at the RF front end,
most likely requiring an LNA. Nevertheless, a range of 350ft
with +20dBm transmit power, or 700 ft for +30 dBm, is practical for many applications.

Further work will focus on designing ultra-low power IF

baseband circuits and development of the entire integrated
wake-up ISM signal receiver for WSN applications.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance and

support of California Institute for Telecommunications and
Information Technology (CALIT2) and Mr. Don Kimball of
CALIT2 for providing necessary equipment and materials for
experiments. The authors would also like to acknowledge
valuable discussions with Professor Curt Shurgers of UCSD
and Mr. Kory Brown of ZTE.

E -10
10 -20

1-f0

-30
0. -40
-50
a.
-60
-70

REFERENCES

[1] L. Gu, et. al, "Radio-Triggered Wake-up Capability for Sensor

Networks" Real-Time and Embedded Tech. and Applications
Symp., 2004. Proceedings. RTAS 2004, 10iIEEE, pp. 27-36.
[2] S. Roundy, et. al, Energy Scavenging for Wireless Sensor Networks with Special Focus on Vibrations, Norwell, MA: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2004
[3] B. Cook, et. al, "Low power RF design for sensor networks"
2005 RFIC Symp. Dig., 12-14 June 2005, pp. 357-360.
[4] B. Otis, et. al, "A 400uW Rx, 1.6mW Tx Superregenerative
Transceiver for Wireless Sensor Networks", IEEE ISSCC Digest
of Technical Papers, Feb 2005
[5] A-S. Porret, et. al, "An Ultralow-Power UHF Transceiver Integrated in a Standard Digital CMOS Process: Archtecture and
Receiver," IEEE Journal of Solid-state Circuits, vol. 36, issue 3,
pp 452-466, March 2001
[6] T. Melly, et. al, "An Ultralow-Power UHF Transceiver Integrated in a Standard Digital CMOS Process: Transmitter," IEEE
Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 467-472,
2001
[7] A. Molnar, et. al, "An Ultra-Low Power 900MHz RF Transceiver for Wireless Sensor Networks," IEEE Custom Integrated
Circuits Conf:, pp 401-404, October 2004
[8] S. von der Mark, et. al, "Three stage wakeup scheme for sensor
networks" Microwave and Optoelectronics, 2005 SBMO/IEEE
MTT-S International Conference, pp. 205-208, July 2005.
[9] 2005 CFR Title 47, vol. 1, Chapter I "Federal Communications
Commission", Part 15 "Radio Frequency devices", Section
15.247 "Operation within the band 902-928 MHz, 2400-2483.5
MHz and 5725-5850 MHz"
[10] R.E. Ziemer, W.H. Tranter, Principles of Communications, Systems, Modulation and Noise, Wiley, 5fi edition, 2001.
[11] Agilent Technologies, "The Criterion for Tangential Sensitivity
Measurement," Application Note 956-1, 1999
[12] Avago Technologies, "HSMS-2850 Zero bias small signal diode," HSMS-285x datasheet, 2005
[13] Antenna Factor, "HWR series 1/2-wave center fed dipole antennas." ANT-916-CW-HWR-SMA datasheet, rev. 07/07/2006
[14] C.A. Balanis, Antenna Theory: Analysis and Design, Harper and
Row, N. Y., 1982
[15] T.S. Rappaport, Wireless Communications: Principles and
Practice, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall, 2001
[16] J.M. Molina-Garcia-Pardo, et. al, "Channel Model at 868MHz
for Wireless Sensor Networks in Outdoor Scenarios", International Workshop on Wireless Ad hoc Networks, London, 23-26
May 2005.

10
15
20
25
30
log-distance in feet, 10*1og1o(d(ft))

Fig. 5: Received power (dBm) versus 10*log(d(feet)) is modeled

using a double regression model. Transition from n = 1.7 to n = 3.3
happens at the Fresnel zone distance.

400

m 90
O

80
Z 70
z
cn 60
50
m 40
o 30
"
20
10
0
o -10

300

200 41
100 w
0

-70

-60

-50

-40

-30

-20

-10

Received power (dBm)

Fig. 6: Lab and field measurements at UCSD of SNR as function
of received (RX) power. Right scale shows measured range R corresponding to power received. PTX = +20 dBm. Saturation at higher
received power is due to the final IF amplifier.

VIII. CONCLUSION

High performance wakeup radios for WSNs can be effectively implemented over a practical range with zero bias
square-law diode detectors. Square-law detectors are also insensitive to changes in carrier frequency, and are therefore
compatible with spread spectrum modulation, allowing higher
transmitter output power. A transmit waveform has been suggested for use with the passive detector that uses spread spectrum and reduces the noise contribution of the IF amplifiers.

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