PASES: An energy-aware design space exploration framework for wireless sensor networks

Energy consumption is one of the most constraining requirements for the development and implementation of wireless sensor networks. Many design aspects affect energy consumption, ranging from the hardware components, operations of the sensors, the communication protocols, the application algorithms, and the application duty cycle. A full design space exploration solution is therefore required to estimate the contribution to energy consumption of all of these factors, and significantly decrease the effort and time spent to choose the right architecture that fits best to a particular application. In this paper we present a flexible and extensible simulation and design space exploration framework called “PASES” for accurate power consumption analysis of wireless sensor networks. PASES performs both performance and energy analysis, including the application, the communication and the platform layers, providing an extensible and customizable environment. The framework assists the designers in the selection of an optimal hardware solution and software implementation for the specific project of interest ranging from standalone to large scale networked systems. Experimental and simulation results demonstrate the framework accuracy and utility.