Modeling Power Consumption in Sensor Networks:

Power consumption is a crucial characteristic of sensor networks and their applications, as sensor nodes are commonly battery driven. Although recent research focuses strongly on energy aware applications and operating systems, power consumption is still a limiting factor. Once sensor nodes are deployed, it is challenging and sometimes even impossible to change batteries. As a result, erroneous lifetime prediction causes high costs and may render a sensor network useless, before its purpose is fulfilled.

We developed AEON (Accurate Prediction of Power Consumption), a novel evaluation tool to quantitatively predict power consumption of sensor nodes and whole sensor networks. Our energy model, based on measurements of node current draw and the execution of real code, enables accurate prediction of the actual power consumption of sensor nodes. Consequently, preventing erroneous assumptions on node and network lifetime. Moreover, our detailed energy model allows to compare different low power and energy aware approaches in terms of energy efficiency. Thus, it enables a highly precise estimation of the overall lifetime of a sensor network.

Key features:

• Energy analysis
  • Detailed and validated energy model for each sensor node component
  • Accuratly predict node and network lifetime
  • Predicts power consumption during program execution
  • Shutdown a node, when a certain energy limit is exceeded
  • Records detailed current vs. time graphs for each node component
• Energy profling
  • Profiling of applications to identify software routines consuming much power
• Radio propagation model
  • Free space radio propagation model to enable the analysis of multihop application

Implemenation:

We base the implementation of AEON on the AVRORA Senor Node Emulation Framework (UCLA Compilers Group). Currently there is much joint work to extend AVRORA and AEON.

Project:

AEON is part of the Momentum project and is funded by DFG.

Questions:

Questions and feedback are always highly welcome. Feel free to contact me.

Related Publications:

• Olaf Landsiedel, Klaus Wehrle, Stefan Götz: "Accurate Prediction of Power Consumption in Sensor Networks", In Proceedings of The Second IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNetS-II), Sydney, Australia, May 2005
• Olaf Landsiedel, Klaus Wehrle, Simon Rieche, Stefan Goetz, Leo Petrak: "Projet AEON", 4th GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch "Wireless Sensor Networks", ETH Zurich, March 2005
• Olaf Landsiedel, Klaus Wehrle, Ben L. Titzer (UCLA), Jens Palsberg (UCLA): "Enabling Detailed Modeling and Analysis of Sensor Networks", accepted for publication in Special Issue on Sensor Networks of PIK Journal, 2005
• Olaf Landsiedel, Klaus Wehrle, Stefan Götz: "AEON: Accurate Prediction of Power Consumption in Sensor Nodes", Poster und Extended Abstract at IEEE SeCon, 1st IEEE International Conference on Sensor and Ad hoc Communications and Networks, Santa Clara, USA, October 2004