Power monitoring and testing in Wireless Sensor Network Development
Matthias Woehrle, Jan Beutel, Roman Lim, Mustafa Yuecel, Lothar Thiele · 2008
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming widely used in scientific applications as they allow for instrumenting the environment in previously impossible ways revealing unprecedented insight and detailed data. Long term monitoring of environmental processes and the harsh reality of remote and inaccessible terrain demand longevity from such WSN deployments. While functional correctness is typically the developers prime concern, unattended operation without the possibility to scavenge energy nor to exchange batteries demand applications to be significantly optimized for power consumption. Thus, power consumption of the application becomes a chief concern of system design where development necessitates appropriate means for monitoring, profiling and analysis. We propose the monitoring and testing of power consumption in an integrated testing infrastructure. We additionally present a novel methodology for automatic power profile testing for embedded systems in the context of WSNs.