On Increasing Lifetime for Wearable Networks using Out-of-Band Wakeup Communication

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) has increased the application of sensor networks in healthcare. Wearable device communication is one of the major fields that benefited from it. A generic wearable device suffers from low resources especially in terms of energy. Controlling the power consumption is very important so that the devices may work for longer duration. To save power, a device is turned off. However, it needs to remain in on state to communicate. In this paper, we propose an efficient mechanism to handle the on/off periods using a radio triggered wakeup mechanism. Our aim is to maximize the sleeping time of a device and avoid unnecessary wakeup time (idle listening) to save power. It is found that our method is able to conserve power and prolong the lifetime of the device.