Modeling of Current Consumption in 802.15.4/ZigBee Sensor Motes

Battery consumption is a key aspect in the performance of wireless sensor networks. One of the most promising technologies for this type of networks is 802.15.4/ZigBee. This paper presents an empirical characterization of battery consumption in commercial 802.15.4/ZigBee motes. This characterization is based on the measurement of the current that is drained from the power source under different 802.15.4 communication operations. The measurements permit the definition of an analytical model to predict the maximum, minimum and mean expected battery lifetime of a sensor networking application as a function of the sensor duty cycle and the size of the sensed data.