A receiving apparatus does not frequently activate a host processor in a sleep mode, so that it is possible to reduce a time overhead when the host processor transitions from a sleep mode to a running mode, also suppress power consumed in the overhead time and improve communication performance. With this apparatus, a communication interface circuit (101) extracts packet data from a signal received from a network. A communication interface control circuit (102) decides whether or not packet data is packet data that must be received, and, when the packet data is packet data that must be received, issues an interrupt signal. A power supply circuit (106) supplies power. When receiving the interrupt signal, the host processor (107) executes a program including reception processing.