Is Arduino a suitable platform for sensor nodes?

Over the last years, a significant amount of research papers based their practical evaluation of wireless sensor network-related topics on deployments consisting of Arduino-based sensor nodes. Arduino, on the other hand, offers prototyping boards not tailored for in-the-field deployments. Also, the boards are not specifically designed for ultra low power operation required for long-lasting wireless sensor nodes.We consequently raise the question, whether Arduino is indeed a suitable platform for wireless sensor nodes. For this reason, we evaluated recent Arduino boards by (i) comparing their specifications with common sensor nodes and (ii) analyzing their power consumption in active as well as different sleep modes. Additionally, we evaluated the software components provided by Arduino (i.e., bootloader and libraries).In conclusion, Arduino offers an easy-to-use and cheap basis for early development or analysis, but it falls short in terms of high power consumption as well as issues caused by the bootloader and other integrity issues in the libraries. Therefore, Arduino may be suitable to support the sensor node development but has noticeable drawbacks for actual deployments.