Profiling energy consumption of Wireless Sensor Nodes with almost zero effort

We present a technique to profile the energy consumption of real Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. The introduced method is highly integrated into the system and allows the developer of WSN algorithms to analyze the power consumption almost without any additional effort. It can break the power consumption down to any desired level from function-based or thread-based analysis to the evaluation of functional blocks. The required measuring setup relies on a simple circuit using an instrumentation amplifier and a shunt. Energy profiling uses features of the GNU Compiler Collection and benefits from the multi-threading operating system μkleos written in pure C code. Compared to similar approaches in this field the energy profiler does not require any modifications to device drivers or application code. Due to this easily deployable method it is feasible to examine the demand for energy for every single node in the network.