The integration of wireless communication, e.g., in real- or quasi-real-time applications, is related to many challenges such as energy consumption, communication range, quality of service, and reliability. The improvement of wireless sensor networks (WSN) performance starts by enhancing the capabilities of each sensor node. To minimize latencies without increasing energy consumption, wake-up receiver (WuRx) nodes have been introduced in recent works since they can be always-on or power-gated with short latencies by a power consumption in the range of some microwatts. Compared to standard receiver technologies, they are usually characterized by drawbacks in terms of sensitivity. To overcome the limitation of the sensitivity of WuRxs, a design of a low noise amplifier (LNA) with several design specifications is required. The challenging task of the LNA design is to provide equitable trade-off performances such as gain, power consumption, the noise figure, stability, linearity, and impedance matching. The design of fast settling LNA for a duty-cycled WuRx front-end operating at a 868 MHz frequency band is investigated in this work. The paper details the trade-offs between design challenges and illustrates practical considerations for the simulation and implementation of a radio frequency (RF) circuit. The implemented LNA competes with many commercialized designs where it reaches single-stage 12 dB gain at a 1.8 V voltage supply and consumes only a 1.6 mA current. The obtained results could be made tunable by working with off-the-shelf components for different wake-up based application exigencies.

Wireless sensor network (WSN) with energy-saving capabilities have drawn considerable attention in recent years, as they are the key for long-term monitoring and embedded applications. To improve the power efficiency of wireless sensor nodes, a wake-up technology was introduced in the research community. Such a device reduces the system’s energy consumption without affecting the latency. Thereby, the introduction of wake-up receiver (WuRx)-based technology has grown in several sectors. The use of WuRx in a real environment without consideration of physical environmental conditions, such as the reflection, refraction, and diffraction caused by different materials, that affect the reliability of the whole network. Indeed, the simulation of different protocols and scenarios under such circumstances is a success key for a reliable WSN. Simulating different scenarios is required to evaluate the proposed architecture before its deployment in a real-world environment. The contribution of this study emerges in the modeling of different link quality metrics, both hardware and software metrics that will be integrated into an objective modular network testbed in C++ (OMNeT++) discrete event simulator afterward are discussed, with the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) for the hardware metric case and the packet error rate (PER) for the software metric study case using WuRx based on a wake-up matcher and SPIRIT1 transceiver. The different behaviors of the two chips are modeled using machine learning (ML) regression to define parameters such as sensitivity and transition interval for the PER for both radio modules. The generated module was able to detect the variation in the PER distribution as a response in the real experiment output by implementing different analytical functions in the simulator.