Measuring and Controlling Energy Consumption of Sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is built of two types of nodes: regular sensor nodes and base stations. The regular sensor nodes monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, pressure, etc. and cooperatively pass their data through the network to base stations. The base stations periodically transfer received messages to server. There are many applications of wireless sensor network, such as Health care monitoring, Environmental sensing, and Forest fire detection. Since sensors are powered by batteries, energy efficiency is a key issue for wireless sensor network. Researchers have proposed lots of complicated energy-efficient MAC or routing protocols. However, the effectiveness of these protocols is usually validated through simulations but not real experiments: this is due to a lack of precise measurements of energy consumptions. Previously, researchers measure energy consumption by mapping voltage to energy. However, voltage to energy mapping is not injective, which means measuring the energy consumption precisely is impossible in this way. In order to overcome the energy measurement problem, one project aims to develop a system which provides plug-and-play energy measuring hardware boards, easy-to-use local software, and user-friendly data management system on the server. As a sub-project, the purpose of this project is to implement the local software (server script and client script) and data management system (a website for displaying data). Researchers in sensor networks are able to easily use our system to carry out real experiments for re-evaluating many energy-efficient protocols. Technical details of implementation will be discussed in this report. In the first section, we introduce simulation specifics of the wireless sensor network and how to run a simulation with our code. Second section presents the structure and deployment of website. The last section gives several simulation examples to demonstrate the efficiency of moving base stations routing algorithm.