Modeling Energy Consumption of Wireless Sensor Networks by SystemC

Energy consumption is one of the most important metrics in wireless sensor networks because of the limited power supply in sensor nodes. Many efforts have been taken to reduce the energy consumption of the hardware, software, communication protocols and applications. Simulation is widely used to evaluate the performance of these new designs. Thus, it is necessary to accurately model the energy consumption during the simulation of WSN. In this paper, an energy model for WSN is proposed. It has been implemented in IDEA1, a simulator for WSN developed by SystemC and C++. It enables the energy estimation of both the hardware components of an individual node and the whole sensor network. It can be easily calibrated to different types of node if the electrical characteristics of the hardware components are available. An application based on IEEE 802.15.4 and MICAz motes is studied to demonstrate the capability of the energy model.