Towards a comprehensive power consumption model for wireless sensor nodes

Abstract

Energy efficiency is the most outstanding design criterion for wireless sensor nodes and especially wireless body sensors. Because a detailed measurement of the system's power consumption is not possible during the design process and often too complex for already manufactured devices, the power consumption has to be estimated. This leads to the need for a comprehensive and modular model for the power consumption of WSNs, which is proposed in this work. Due to the modular structure of the model the user is able to get a first estimate in an early stage of the design process (e.g. choose components) and to get a more accurate estimation later in the design process by lowering the abstraction level. This tackles the demanding trade-off between accuracy and usability in modeling.