Run-time Monitoring of Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

As sensor nodes are commonly battery-operated, energy consumption is a major concern in most wireless sensor networks. Run-time monitoring of energy consumption in sensor nodes is crucial to obtaining the network-wide distribution of remaining energy. In this paper, we present a computation-efficient approach to the run-time monitoring of energy consumption of MICA2 nodes running TinyOS applications. A standalone TinyOS module is developed to capture both low-level events and high level commands to track the state transitions of individual hardware components of the nodes. The energy consumption of the nodes is estimated with a power model adjusted regularly according to the readings of supply voltage. The lifetime of the nodes is predicted by linear extrapolation of their current energy consumption estimates.