Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of hundreds or thousands of sensor nodes with limited processing, storage, and battery capabilities. There are several strategies to reduce the power consumption of WSN nodes (by increasing the network lifetime) and increase the reliability of the network (by improving the WSN Quality of Service). However, there is an inherent conflict between power consumption and reliability: an increase in reliability usually leads to an increase in power consumption. For example, routing algorithms can send the same packet though different paths (multipath strategy), which it is important for reliability, but they significantly increase the WSN power consumption. In this context, this paper proposes a model for evaluating the reliability of WSNs considering the battery level as a key factor. Moreover, this model is based on routing algorithms used by WSNs. In order to evaluate the proposed models, three scenarios were considered to show the impact of the power consumption on the reliability of WSNs.

Power consumption is the main concern in developing Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. Consequently, several strategies have been proposed for investigating the power consumption of this kind of application. These strategies can help to predict the WSN lifetime, provide recommendations to application developers and may optimize the energy consumed by the WSN applications. While measurement is a known and precise strategy for power consumption evaluation, it is very costly, tedious and may be unfeasible considering the (usual) large number of WSN nodes. Furthermore, due to the inherent dynamism of WSNs, the instrumentation required by measurement techniques makes difficult their use in several different scenarios. In this context, this paper presents an approach for evaluating the power consumption of WSN applications by using simulation models along with a set of tools to automate the proposed approach. Starting from a programming language code, we automatically generate consumption models used to predict the power consumption of WSN applications. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, we compare the results obtained by using the generated models against ones obtained by measurement.

Power consumption is a primary interest in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), and a large number of strategies have been proposed to evaluate it. However, those approaches usually neither consider reliability issues nor the power consumption of applications executing in the network. A central concern is the lack of consolidated solutions that enable us to evaluate the power consumption of applications and the network stack also considering their reliabilities. To solve this problem, we introduce a fully automatic solution to design power consumption aware WSN applications and communication protocols. The solution presented in this paper comprises a methodology to evaluate the power consumption based on the integration of formal models, a set of power consumption and reliability models, a sensitivity analysis strategy to select WSN configurations and a toolbox named EDEN to fully support the proposed methodology. This solution allows accurately estimating the power consumption of WSN applications and the network stack in an automated way.