A Survey of Low-Power Transceivers and Their Applications

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs) energy efficiency and communication reliability are often conflicting requirements. Additionally, some application areas such as industrial automation or infrastructure monitoring impose strict latency bounds. Low-power receivers (<; 1 mW power consumption) together with adapted MAC protocols have the potential to meet these diverse requirements. We present an overview of state-of-the-art low-power receivers and relate their characteristics to requirements for different application areas. We compare low-power receivers to duty-cycled transceivers and present applications depending on them. For this, we use power consumption, sensitivity, and data rate as key performance figures for low-power receivers. Based on the characteristics of the applications we derive guidelines for using low-power receivers instead of duty-cycled transceivers.