A runtime energy monitoring system for wireless sensor networks

One of the most important issues in the development of wireless sensor networks is energy efficiency. Therefore, it is important to have accurate measurements of the energy consumption of each node.We propose a simple and accurate measurement approach capable to handle this issue. An integrated prototype of our measurement setup was built for the mica2 platform. It can be directly plugged onto the mica2 mote and allows the mote to monitor its energy consumption during runtime. Due to the low costs of our approach it is feasible to employ it in a whole wireless sensor network. The setup shows good accuracy and low power consumption. The mote has access to the measurement setup over the I2C-Bus. Our approach can be easily ported to other wireless sensor network platforms.