System-Level Design Space Exploration Methodology for Energy-Efficient Sensor Node Configurations: An Experimental Validation

For sensor nodes deployed at small distances, computation energy along with radio energy determines the battery life. We have proposed a system-level design space exploration methodology in [1] for searching an energy-efficient error-correcting code (ECC). This methodology takes into account the computation and the radio energy in an integrated manner. In this paper, we validate this methodology by deploying the Imote2 nodes and measuring energy values under different operating modes, e.g., with and without ECC. In this process, we propose a validation framework and node energy model. Experimental results validate the methodology and show that with ECC we can save up to 14% transmitter energy under a certain set of conditions. The main contribution of this paper is that it establishes experimentally that our methodology is effective in exploration of various node configurations and finding an energy-efficient solution.