Rethinking Battery-free Sensing Communication via Wake-up Radios

Abstract

Battery-free sensors expose short, stochastic communication windows and may lose timing state whenever their main energy domain browns out. MagPie combines a microampere wake-up radio (WuR) with a separately backed low-power real-time clock (LP-RTC): the WuR widens the first-contact window, while the LP-RTC preserves the acquired phase for later exchanges. Energy gates, epoch-versioned schedules, and idempotent slot allocation extend this mechanism to static, single-hop All-to-One collection without a powered control anchor. The analysis accounts for role selection and duty-cycled listening, and bounds scheduled-retry tails only under explicit conditional quantile coverage. Evaluation separates three scopes. In independent, administratively censored simulation trials, MagPie completes 100/100 first rendezvous events in each of five trace-parameterized harvesting scenarios; Find completes 36-100/100. A single-collision-domain slotted-Aloha study shows that adaptive K is necessary at high contender density and reports mean, P95, and confidence intervals through 120 components. Finally, controlled STM32WL33 experiments validate alignment, clock persistence, and six-device slot execution, including an 11.05-hour functional run. The study does not claim measured end-to-end energy, ambient-harvesting performance, or multi-hop scalability; highly variable harvesting still limits collection because coordination cannot create missing energy.