Energy evaluations in wireless sensor networks: a reality check

ABSTRACT

The development of energy-efficient applications and protocols is one of the most important issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). However, most publications up to now avoid time consuming realistic energy evaluations and oversimplify their evaluation with regard to energy-efficiency. This work aims at lowering the barrier for realistic energy evaluations. We focus on a generic application that simply transmits one packet using TinyOS Low Power Listening (LPL), which we evaluate using the WSN testbed SANDbed. Our results disprove some intuitive expectations. For example, we show that transmitting packets with a large payload can be cheaper in terms of energy consumption than a small payload. As packet transmission is part of almost any WSN application, the results shown are important to many WSN protocol evaluations. As an addition, we contribute our lessons learned by discussing the most important challenges and pitfalls we faced during our evaluation.

References

1. A. Hergenröder and J. Horneber. Facing Challenges in Evaluation of WSN Energy Efficiency with Distributed Energy Measurements. In Proceedings of Multihop Wireless Network Testbeds and Experiments Workshop (TESTBEDS), Istanbul, Turkey, July 2011.
2. A. Hergenröder, J. Wilke, and D. Meier. Distributed Energy Measurements in WSN Testbeds with a Sensor Node Management Device (SNMD). In Workshop Proceedings of the 23th Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS), pages 341--438, Hannover, Germany, Feb. 2010. VDE Verlag.
3. V. Shnayder, M. Hempstead, B.-r. Chen, G. W. Allen, and M. Welsh. Simulating the power consumption of large-scale sensor network applications. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Embedded networked sensor systems (SenSys), page 188, New York, USA, Nov. 2004. ACM Press.
4. B. L. Titzeri, K. D. Lee, and J. Palsberg. Avrora: Scalable Sensor Network Simulation with Precise Timing. In Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), page 67, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2005.

Index Terms

• Information systems