Experimental evaluation of interference impact on the energy consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), the development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) arises different challenges. Two of the main issues are electromagnetic interference and the lifetime of WSN nodes. In this paper, we show and evaluate experimentally the relation between interference and energy consumption, which impacts the network lifetime. We present a platform based on commercially available low-cost hardware in order to evaluate the impact of electromagnetic interference in 2.4 GHz ISM band on energy consumption of WSN. The energy measurements are obtained separately from each electronic component in the node. Interference and energy measurements are conducted in an anechoic chamber and in an office-type lab environment. X-MAC protocol is chosen to manage the Radio Duty Cycle of the nodes and its energy performance is evaluated. The energy consumption transmitter nodes is analyzed particularly in this work. Moreover, this energy consumption has been quantified and differentiated according to the number of (re-)transmissions carried out by the transmitter as well as the number of ACK packets sent by the receiver for a single packet. Finally, we use a model of real battery to calculate the lifetime of the node for operation within different interference level zones. This study lays the basis for further design rules of communication protocols and development of WSNs.