Power Consumption Monitor for Wireless Sensor Nodes

Low power is a key element in the design of a wireless sensor node. It is necessary to know the power consumption details of sensors, microcontroller, transceiver, and other components before optimization. However, different application has different configuration. It isn´t convenient to create theoretic model for each platform. We proposed a portable power consumption monitoring testbed for wireless sensor nodes (WSN), which can real-time acquire the information of current and voltage change. First of all, the system architecture is described, special for the current-sense amplifier (ADM4073), ADC (AD7705). Then, give out the schematic, flowchart and algorithm of AD7705 and microcontroller (Atmega16L). Finally, experiment results and analysis are given out based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) platform ´MicaZ´. It is shown that this testbed can well monitor the power consumption of WSN.