Journals Proceedings

Abstract

This document presents a detailed analytical and practical method for the estimation of battery life expectancy of a multi-hop mesh network. This network is composed by a set of MicaZ nodes using the XMesh routing protocol. The energy drawn for each of the tasks performed by the nodes is measured, and network topology and radio propagation are characterized in order to obtain accurate predictions of the lower bound for the battery duration of the nodes. This estimation is of paramount importance for field deployments, where energy is a scarce resource and replacing node batteries is a slow and costly process that can disable the network for relatively long periods of time.