Experimental Assessment of the Battery Lifetime in WSN Based on the Duty-Cycle Current Average Method

A great amount of work addressed methods for predicting the battery lifetime in wireless sensor systems. In spite of these efforts, the reported experimental results demonstrate that the duty-cycle current average method, which is widely used to this aim, fails in accurately estimating the battery life time of most of the presented wireless sensor system applications. The aim of this paper is to experimentally assess the duty-cycle current average method in order to give more effective insight on the effectiveness of the method. An electronic metering system, based on a dedicated PCB, has been designed and developed to experimentally measure node current consumption profiles and charge extracted from the battery in two selected case studies. A battery lifetime measurement (during 30 days) has been carried out. Experimental results have been assessed and compared with estimations given by using the duty-cycle current average method. Based on the measurement results, we show that the assumptions on which the method is based do not hold in real operating cases. The rationality of the duty-cycle current average method needs reconsidering.