Measuring Energy Consumption of a Wireless Sensor Node During Transmission: panStamp

In most of the real-life application scenarios, where Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are deployed, the energy is a limited and valuable resource. Many energy-based strategies were proposed in the literature to reduce the power consumption of sensor nodes and thus enhance the network lifetime. When those algorithms are developed and tested with some well-known network simulators like NS3, OPNET, the energy estimation aspect is not a key criterion, because these simulators have their own specific energy models. By implementing these algorithms in a real sensor node, the energy consumption can be measured and compared to the results provided by other previously implemented approaches. This paper proposes a method for estimating the energy consumption of a low power wireless node panStamp NRG 2.0. The proposed model calculates the consumed energy of the system, at run time for different operation cycles. Besides, since the biggest amount of energy is consumed during the communication, this paper aims to characterize the power consumption in the transmission state. A proper metric of the energy consumed per byte transmission pattern of the packets is provided. The results can be used to derive not only the energy consumption for other protocols but also the energy needed to transmit one byte as well as the payload size are given.