Dynamic Autonomous Energy Consumption Measurement for a Wireless Sensor Node

Energy efficiency is one of the major challenging issue in the design of a Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Various energy-based techniques were developed to reduce the energy consumption. Most of these techniques use the residual energy of a sensor node as one of the significant factor to design an energy-aware scheme. However, these techniques estimate the residual energy based on the current or voltage. Thus, leading to fundamental errors as they do not consider the characteristics of batteries and the external impacts that can affect the network operability. In this paper, a low power cost effective circuit is designed to measure the current consumption, for later the power consumption is calculated and then the residual energy of the used batteries is measured. Experiments are carried out using the wireless node panStamp.