Enhancing performance of wireless sensor networks in glacial environments using wake-up receivers

Development of radio telemetry enabled long-term monitoring of hard-to-reach and harsh environments. This paper compares two WSN deployment projects for gathering sensor data in glacier monitoring application - GlacsWeb and PermaSense, in terms of system design and wireless communication. We discuss the potential benefits of energy-efficient event detection using wake-up receivers together with duty-cycled communication. We show that adding a WURx would increase the average power consumption of Dozer protocol for 10%, but it would reduce the delay from 2 minutes to several milliseconds. Besides for event detection, WURx could be used for synchronizing the beginning of the TDMA communication, which would eliminate the need for clock drift compensation, making the protocol simpler and lighter.