an extended period of time which may significantly impact battery life a third option includes powering on a new node in range of the sleeping network and keeping it fully awake until the rest of the network wakes up and the nodes can exchange synchronization information this technique has the disadvantage that the newly added node can deplete a significant portion of its batteries in the time it waits to join the network some embodiments of the invention improve upon prior methods by providing one or more nodes that can be woken during the coordinated sleep period such as by toggling an i o or interrupt line to wake a network node near the node being serviced for example a failed mesh network node can be replaced by removing the failed node powering on a replacement node and toggling an interrupt line by actuating a switch on a neighboring node such that the neighboring node wakes up for a predetermined amount of time this enables the neighboring node to communicate with the replacement node exchanging information such as the pan id encryption keys sleep timing and other information to incorporate the new node into the mesh network fig1 illustrates an example mesh network environment such as may be used to practice some embodiments of the invention a mesh network.