Low-Latency Massive Access with Multicast Wake Up Radio

Abstract: The use of Wake-Up Radio (WUR) in Internet of Things (IoT) networks can significantly improve their energy efficiency: battery-powered sensors can remain in a low-power (sleep) mode while listening for wake-up messages using their WUR and reactivate only when polled, saving energy. However, polling-based Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) may significantly increase data transmission delay if packets are generated sporadically, as nodes with no information still need to be polled. In this paper, we examine the effect of multicast polling for WUR-enabled wireless nodes. The idea is to assign nodes to multicast groups so that all nodes in the same group can be solicited by a multicast polling message. This may cause collisions, which can be solved by requesting retransmissions from the involved nodes. We analyze the performance of different multicast polling and retransmission strategies, showing that the optimal approach can significantly reduce the delay over TDMA and ALOHA in low-traffic scenarios while keeping good energy efficiency.