An Off-line tool for accurately estimating the lifetime of a mote

In wide scale, low power wireless networks comprising battery-backed embedded systems or motes, it is always desirable to avoid frequent replacement of batteries. This necessitates the need to accurately estimate the energy consumption during mote operations prior to deployment, thereby avoiding unexpected decreased network coverage as a result of untimely mote “deaths.” Motivated by this need, the overriding purpose of this research is to profile the energy consumption during typical mote operations using an simple, novel analytical model, and validate it using measurements from a testbed. The mote operation life for a set of PHY layer functions estimated using our analytical model was within 14-20% of the value obtained from the testbed. In addition, the energy consumption during the basic modes of a practical medium access control (MAC) protocol has been modeled, and was observed to be within 15-21% of the values obtained from the testbed.