An IoT-enabled Platform for Power Consumption Measurement of Low-Power Wireless Sensor Devices

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) were considered as one of the key technologies for Internet of Things (IoT). Often, many sensor nodes are battery operated devices, and thus low power consumption is considered as one of the key design challenges for low-power WSNs. In this paper, we present the architecture and its low-cost implementation of a platform by using commodity hardware and open-source software, suitable for measurements of the power consumption of distributed low-power wireless sensor devices. We have built two types of sensor nodes which operate in cyclic sleeping mode and use two different wireless radio standards, namely IEEE 802.11 b/g/n and IEEE 802.15.4. Experiments were conducted to measure and compare the power consumption and active time per cyclic-sleep interval of both sensor node types under different conditions such as different payload lengths and sleep intervals. Experimental results showed that our proposed approach could identify and characterize the behavior of the tested wireless sensors nodes.