Power consumption measurements of WSN based on Arduino

Abstract

To deal with the deficiencies and limitations for existing wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes, such as low generality, low degree of variability and poor flexibility, Arduino WSN node’s development benefits are integrated with Bluetooth wireless communication characteristics. This paper introduces four simple point-to-point WSN power measurement methods. Each WSN node is constructed from Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller, Bluetooth module, and different sensors. The paper’s goal is to characterize the power consumption at different power-saving modes. So, numerous power measurement methodologies are presented to measure the power consumption of the WSN node, in real-time, for different power saving modes such as (idle, sleep, power-down, etc.). These methodologies also determine the power consumption at communication states. Then the results obtained from these states show that the idle mode consumes more power than the other modes. In addition, the transmitted state consumes the major power regardless of the data rate used during the communication between the two ends.