Energy consumption measurements and reduction of Zigbee based wireless sensor networks

This paper discusses energy consumption reduction in Zigbee based networks. We introduce energy consumption benchmarking platform (ECBP) - a versatile data acquisition based energy consumption profiling system for WSNs. The ECBP can be utilized to find power intensive processes in a given system, discover energy consumption anomalies and wasted power, measure active duty and sleep cycles, measure voltage, current, power, and energy consumption for a given time period, and discover power consumption related faults in sensor networks. We show how to use ECBP on a Zigbee based sensor network to reduce power consumption by an order of magnitude, thus, extending the network lifetime by the same factor.