Abstract: Energy efficiency is a key design issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs).It is necessary to know the power consumption of each component before optimization. However, different applications need different configurations which will lead to many different hardware platforms. We do some research on the energy efficiency monitoring of WSNs, and propose a portable and realtime energy consumption monitoring device for wireless sensor nodes, which measures the current and voltage information in the real world. Compared to simulation, this can be used to monitor the energy efficiency of WSNs in the real world. Furthermore, the experimental results on the wireless sensor network platform named MicaZ show that our design can well monitor the energy consumption of WSNs. Moreover, the energy dissipation of each component on a sensor node also shows that the power consumption of sensors can not be ignored.

Key words: wireless sensor networks;energy consumption monitoring;current sense amplifier;TinyOS