Electricity-Metering in a Connected World: Virtual Sensors for Estimating the Electricity Consumption of IoT Appliances

Due to rising electricity prices, there is an increasing incentive to save energy. Therefore, more and more large organizations intend to reduce their energy consumption. Often, their plans cannot be realized due to missing insights into the causes energy consumption. Centralized energy meters provide no information at which appliances the energy is spent and the installation of thousands of distributed meters is often not feasible from an economic point of view. To simplify the energy metering in large scale, we propose to make Internet of Things (IoT) appliances aware of their own electricity consumption using on software based virtual energy sensors. We demonstrate how to automatically generate those energy models for nearly arbitrary networked devices with a high accuracy. Our purely software based energy metering solution approximates the energy consumption of common office equipment with an error between 2.19% and 10.8%. Using our approach, IoT appliances become aware of their own energy expenditure. This greatly simplifies energy metering on device level granularity, giving appropriate user feedback and developing more energy-efficient appliances. All these benefits are achieved without the need for installing additional hardware sensors.