Abstract
Over the past several years the topics of energy consumption and energy harvesting have gained significant importance as a means for improved operation of wireless sensor and mesh networks. Energy-awareness of operation is especially relevant for application scenarios from the domain of environmental monitoring in hard to access areas. In this work we reflect upon our experiences with a real-world deployment of a wireless mesh network. In particular, a comprehensive study on energy measurements collected over several weeks during the summer and the winter period in a network deployment in the Swiss Alps is presented. Energy performance is monitored and analysed for three system components, namely, mesh node, battery and solar panel module. Our findings cover a number of aspects of energy consumption, including the amount of load consumed by a mesh node, the amount of load harvested by a solar panel module, and the dependencies between these two. With our work we aim to shed some light on energy-aware network operation and to help both users and developers in the planning and deployment of a new wireless (mesh) network for environmental research.
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Notes
- 1.
A4-Mesh project and its currently ongoing extension aims at developing a completely functional wireless mesh infrastructure including support for authentication and authorization, accounting, and auditing. For more information, please visit project’s website https://a4-mesh.unibe.ch/
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Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge support from: (a) the A4-Mesh project, carried out as part of the AAA/SWITCH e-Infrastructure for e-Science program which is lead by SWITCH, the Swiss National Research and Education Network, and is supported by funds from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research, (b) the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) framework, under Action IC0804, which supported this work partially, and (c) all persons who made possible the collection of real-world data.
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Jamakovic, A. et al. (2013). Real-World Energy Measurements of a Wireless Mesh Network. In: Pierson, JM., Da Costa, G., Dittmann, L. (eds) Energy Efficiency in Large Scale Distributed Systems. EE-LSDS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8046. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40517-4_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40517-4_18
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