EMPIOT: An energy measurement platform for wireless IoT devices

Profiling and minimizing the energy consumption of resource-constrained devices is an essential step towards employing IoT in various application domains. Due to the large size and high cost of commercial energy measurement platforms, alternative solutions have been proposed by the research community. However, the three main shortcomings of existing tools are complexity, limited measurement range, and low accuracy. Specifically, these tools are not suitable for the energy measurement of new IoT devices such as those supporting the 802.11 technology. In this paper we propose EMPIOT, an accurate, low-cost, easy to build, and flexible, power measurement platform. We present the hardware and software components of this platform and study the effect of various design parameters on accuracy and overhead. In particular, we analyze the effects of driver, bus speed, input voltage, and buffering mechanism on sampling rate, measurement accuracy and processing demand. These extensive experimental studies enable us to configure the system in order to achieve its highest performance. We also propose a novel calibration technique and report the calibration parameters under various settings. Using five different IoT devices performing four types of workloads, we evaluate the performance of EMPIOT against the ground truth obtained from a high-accuracy industrial-grade power measurement tool. Our results show that, for very low-power devices that utilize 802.15.4 wireless standard, the measurement error is less than 3.5%. In addition, for 802.11-based devices that generate short and high power spikes, the error is less than 2.5%.