Connectivity and energy usage in low-power wireless: An experimental study

Abstract

We present an experimental study of the impact of network connectivity on energy usage in low-power wireless. We focus on the ends of the connectivity spectrum and investigate the energy footprint of excessive connectivity as well as poor connectivity. We observe that high connectivity boosts the energy footprint of broadcast traffic, because it is conducive to contention and overhearing. With respect to poor connectivity, we observe that the presence of connectivity outliers may also result in a significant increase of the energy consumption. To enable fair comparisons between experimental runs, we augment our results with quantitative data regarding the network topology during each run.