High level energy consumption estimation and profiling for optimizing Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being gradually introduced in different application scenarios. One of the main constraints for their deployment is energy consumption, as sensor nodes are usually stand alone battery-powered devices. For this reason, most efforts in research are being focused in energy-aware architectures and protocols. To aid in this search of most energy efficient strategies, this work proposes a solution to simulate together all power consuming subsystems of a sensor node and to integrate this information in high level global profiles in order to provide useful information to the designer. In order to achieve that, information about energy consumption is taken into account from different perspectives at the same time. Those perspectives aim for answering where, what for and why power was consumed, solving most frequent semantic gaps the designer has to deal with.