System-level power consumption modeling of a SoC for WSN applications

Energy consumption is a critical issue for wireless sensor networks (WSN) because of the limited energy supply on the nodes. Therefore, performance evaluation is very important, especially at early stages of the design flow. In this work, we present the modeling and simulation of nodes composed by a typical system on chip (SoC) for WSN applications using SystemC/TLM. The SoC contains a MIPS-based processor, a memory, a bus, a timer, a transceiver and a battery. The model is intended to allow power estimation in WSN simulation. The battery module estimates the energy consumption of the node by computing the amount of electrical charge used by each block As a case study, we performed a star topology WSN simulation, showed the power consumption of each node, and presented a discussion about the computational load. This approach is flexible and can be adapted to simulate more complex systems and topologies.