Receiver Design with an Adjustable Energy-Signal-Quality Trade-off for IoT Networks

The energy efficiency of an Internet-of-Things (IoT) receiver can be improved by introducing an adjustable trade-off between signal-quality and energy consumption. In good channel conditions, the receiver can be set to consume less energy per bit, without compromising signal quality in bad channel conditions. We propose a system-level receiver design that enables adequate configuration and combination of signal-quality and energy trade-offs in multiple receiver components. Co-design of all components is essential. We identify the most energy-efficient configurations in our system-level design under different channel conditions. With those configurations, the proposed receiver outperforms a state-of-the-art adjustable receiver with only an adjustable analog front end by several tens of percent in energy per successfully received bit and by 2x in energy-sensitivity configuration range. To show the efficacy of the proposed approach, we integrate a model of the proposed design into the OMNeT++ simulator and show the benefits on an environmental monitoring scenario. In this scenario, we report up to 6x energy savings for the entire transceiver compared to the conventional transceiver design without adjustable receiver.