Accurate network-scale power profiling for sensor network simulators

Abstract

Power consumption is the most important metric in wireless sensor network research, but existing simulation tools for measuring or estimating power consumption are either impractical or have unclear accuracy. We present COOJA/MSPSim, a practical simulation-based tool for network-scale power estimation based on Contiki's built-in power profiling mechanism, the COOJA sensor network simulator and the MSPSim sensor node emulator. We compare experimental results measured on real sensor nodes with simulation results for three different MAC protocols. The accuracy of our results indicates that COOJA/MSPSim enables accurate network-scale simulation of the power consumption of sensor networks. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.