Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) are required to achieve both energy-efficiency and low-latency in order to prolong the network lifetime while being able to quickly respond to actuation commands transmitted based on the real-time sensing data. These two requirements are in general in a relationship of trade-off when each node operates with well-known duty-cycling modes: nodes need to make their radio interfaces (IFs) frequently active in order to promptly detect the communication requests from the other nodes. One approach to break this inherent trade-off, which has been actively studied in recent literature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), is the introduction of wake-up receiver that is installed into each node and used only for detecting the communication requests. The main radio IF in each node is woken up only when needed, i.e., in an on-demand manner, through a wake-up message received by the wake-up receiver. In this paper, we introduce radio-on-demand sensor and actuator networks (ROD-SAN) where the concept of wake-up receiver is applied to realize on-demand WSANs. We first evaluate data collection rate, packet delivery latency, and energy-efficiency of ROD-SAN and duty-cycling modes defined in IEEE 802.15.4e by computer simulations. Then, we present our test-bed implementation of ROD-SAN including all protocols from the lowest layer of wake-up signaling to the application layer offering the functionalities of information monitoring and networked control. Finally, we show experimental results obtained through our field trial in which 20 nodes are deployed in an outdoor area with the scale of 450m × 200m. The numerical results obtained by computer simulations and experiments confirm the effectiveness of ROD-SAN to realize energy-efficient and high-response WSANs.