SEMFI: A Software-Based and Real-Time Energy Monitoring Platform for WiFi IoT Devices

Many WiFi-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices rely on limited energy resources such as a battery. Although monitoring and studying the energy consumption of these devices is essential, the use of external, hardware-based energy measurement tools is costly, non-scalable, and introduces many challenges regarding the connectivity of such tools with devices. In this paper, we propose Software-based Energy Management Tool for WiFi (SEMFI), a novel tool to collect, analyze, and monitor the power cycles of IoT devices without the need for any external tools. The basic idea is to modify the WiFi Access Point (AP)’s software to keep track of the power status of devices reported in packets. SEMFI also includes back-end and front-end components for data storage, analysis, and visualization. We demonstrate the effectiveness and features of SEMFI via empirical evaluations.