Energy harvester-integrated wireless devices are attractive for generating semi-permanent power from wasted energy in industrial environments. The energy-harvesting wireless devices may have difficulty in their communication with access points due to insufficient power supply for beacon recognition during network initialization. In this manuscript, we propose a novel method of beacon recognition based on wake-up control to reduce instantaneous power consumption in the initialization procedure. The proposed method applies a moving window for the periodic wake-up of the wireless devices. For unsynchronized wireless devices, beacons are always located in the same positions within each beacon interval even though the starting offsets are unknown. Using these characteristics, the moving window checks the existence of the beacon associated withspecified resources in a beacon interval, checks again for neighboring resources at the next beacon interval, and so on. This method can reduce instantaneous power and generates a surplus of charging time. Thus, the proposed method alleviates the problems of power insufficiency in the network initialization. The feasibility of the proposed method is evaluated using computer simulations of power shortage in various energy-harvesting conditions.
Keywords: IEEE 802.15.4; beacon recognition; low-power; wake-up.