Software-based on-line energy estimation for sensor nodes

Energy is of primary importance in wireless sensor networks. By being able to estimate the energy consumption of the sensor nodes, applications and routing protocols are able to make informed decisions that increase the lifetime of the sensor network. However, it is in general not possible to measure the energy consumption on popular sensor node platforms. In this paper, we present and evaluate a software-based on-line energy estimation mechanism that estimates the energy consumption of a sensor node. We evaluate the mechanism by comparing the estimated energy consumption with the lifetime of capacitor-powered sensor nodes. By implementing and evaluating the X-MAC protocol, we show how software-based on-line energy estimation can be used to empirically evaluate the energy efficiency of sensor network protocols.

[1]  Mani Srivastava,et al.  Energy efficient routing in wireless sensor networks , 2001, 2001 MILCOM Proceedings Communications for Network-Centric Operations: Creating the Information Force (Cat. No.01CH37277).

[2]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  Residual energy scan for monitoring sensor networks , 2002, 2002 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference Record. WCNC 2002 (Cat. No.02TH8609).

[3]  David E. Culler,et al.  TOSSIM: accurate and scalable simulation of entire TinyOS applications , 2003, SenSys '03.

[4]  Adam Dunkels,et al.  Contiki - a lightweight and flexible operating system for tiny networked sensors , 2004, 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks.

[5]  Ossama Younis,et al.  An experimental study of routing and data aggregation in sensor networks , 2005, IEEE International Conference on Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems Conference, 2005..

[6]  Rolf Winter,et al.  ScatterWeb - Low Power Sensor Nodes and Energy Aware Routing , 2005, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[7]  Adam Dunkels,et al.  Experimental evaluation of lifetime bounds for wireless sensor networks , 2005, Proceeedings of the Second European Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks, 2005..

[8]  David E. Culler,et al.  Telos: enabling ultra-low power wireless research , 2005, IPSN 2005. Fourth International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2005..

[9]  Anand Raghunathan,et al.  Battery discharge characteristics of wireless sensor nodes: an experimental analysis , 2005, 2005 Second Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2005. IEEE SECON 2005..

[10]  Jochen Schiller,et al.  Scatterweb - Low Power Nodes and Energy Aware Routing , 2005 .

[11]  K. Wehrle,et al.  Accurate prediction of power consumption in sensor networks , 2005, The Second IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors, 2005. EmNetS-II..

[12]  Markus Anwander,et al.  Experimental Lifetime Evaluation for MAC Protocols on Real Sensor Hardware , 2006 .

[13]  Eric Anderson,et al.  X-MAC: a short preamble MAC protocol for duty-cycled wireless sensor networks , 2006, SenSys '06.

[14]  David E. Culler,et al.  Micro Power Meter for Energy Monitoring of Wireless Sensor Networks at Scale , 2007, 2007 6th International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks.