Ultra-low power RFID-based wake-up architectures for wireless sensor networks in industrial plants

The integration of wireless communication systems with autonomous vehicles like UAVs and UGVs has the potential to improve operational efficiency and security in industrial plants. In this paper, we present a system architecture based on Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) acting as wake-up radio for sensing nodes. We investigated the potentialities of a programmable IC able to generate trigger signals to wakeup external devices when Radio Frequency events are detected. The findings indicate that there are four potential configurations available based on the desired application. These vary in terms of their selectivity towards the RF event and of their power consumption w.r.t. the harvested energy.