A More Realistic Energy Dissipation Model for Sensor Nodes

Abstract. The efficient use of the limited energy resources is the key challenge in the design of wireless sensor networks. Due to the paramount importance of the energy conservation, all protocols for these networks have to be designed taking into account their energy consumption. When simulation is used to analyze the performance of any energy-aware algorithm, it is necessary to have the information about the energy drop in a sensor node. To this end, in this paper, we propose an energy dissipation model that describes the behavior of a sensor node in terms of energy consumption. In the evaluation of our model, we compare it with an Ideal model that represents the lower bound in terms of energy consumption. Based on the energy dissipation model proposed in this paper, more realistic results can be obtained when evaluating solutions for wireless sensor networks.