Energy Bucket: A Tool for Power Profiling and Debugging of Sensor Nodes

The ability to precisely measure and compare energy consumption and relate this to particular parts of programs is a recurring theme in sensor network research. This paper presents the Energy Bucket, a low-cost tool designed for quick empirical measurements of energy consumptions across 5 decades of current draw. The Energy Bucket provides a light-weight state API for the target system, which facilitates easy scorekeeping of energy consumption between different parts of a target program. We demonstrate how this tool can be used to discover programming errors and debug sensor network applications.Furthermore, we show how this tool, together with the target system API, offers a very detailed analysis of where energy is spent in an application, which proves to be very useful when comparing alternative implementations or validating theoretical energy consumption models.