In the development of wireless sensor networks, power consumption is one of the bottlenecks for wide applications. In order to improve the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks, a wakeup radio scheme is presented. The main transceiver that is responsible for data communication is in the sleep mode most of the time. An additional device called the wakeup radio receiver is a simplified receiver with much lower power consumption and data rate than the main transceiver. It is always on to monitor the channels continuously. It detects the wakeup packet, and sends the main transceiver a wakeup trigger upon successful detection of a wakeup packet. However, the detection of a wakeup packet is a challenging task. Since the wakeup radio receiver operates in the 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical band, a wakeup packet can be greatly interfered in such a noisy channel, which may lead to detection performance degradation. Therefore, a multi-carrier wakeup radio receiver is proposed as a solution to interference mitigation by making use of frequency diversity. But in practical implementations, the impairments from the multi-carrier wakeup receiver itself cannot be neglected. The receiver detection performance may degrade due to the non-idealities at the receiver. In this thesis, the detection performance of the multi-carrier wakeup radio receiver in the presence of channel noise, fading, co-channel interference, as well as non-idealities is explored.