Energy Monitoring of Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Understanding the power characteristics of Wireless Sensor Networks is important, as it will help better understand the system and therefore suggesting ways of improving it. A way to monitor the energy consumption of WSNs is needed. The energy consumed by these WSNs tends to be very small and difficult to measure and that is because the consumed current can be relatively small, in microamperes’ range. Besides the relatively small energy, data loggers that used to monitor the energy are costly and it will be very costly to monitor the energy of multiple nodes. In this paper, an energy monitor that is able to measure small energy has been developed to monitor the energy of energy harvesting WSN. The energy harvesting WSN consists of three main components: the mote, the battery and the energy-harvesting module. The circuitry of each one of these three main components has been built to measure their current and voltage. A low cost data logger to sample the voltage and current data has been built that will be able to sample and store the energy profile of all of the three main components. Data have been visualized through a MATLAB graphical user interface.