Feasibility of Wi-Fi enabled sensors for Internet of Things

The recent trend towards “Internet of Things” combined with the vision of “Web of Things” generated a momentum in the wireless sensor networks industry. Due to the growing market for smart objects with IP connectivity, several companies introduced low-power Wi-Fi products optimized for sensing applications. However, since IEEE 802.11 standard was originally designed for high bandwidth applications targeting consumer electronics market, there exist many doubts on the viability of low-power Wi-Fi for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we empirically evaluate G2M5477, one of the available of-the-shelf low-power Wi-Fi modules, in terms of energy consumption and compare it with published 6LoWPAN results.