Energy evaluations in wireless sensor networks
Christian Stefan Haas, Joachim Wilke · 2011
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.