Energino: An Hardware and Software Solution for Energy Consumption Monitoring

Accurate measurement of energy consumption of practical wireless deployments is vital to the research community to develop pragmatic simulators and analytical models for the synthesis of new energy-aware and energy-efficient protocols and algorithms for wireless networks. However, there is considerable dearth in the availability of affordable and scalable energy consumption monitoring tools for the research community. In this paper, we introduce Energino, a scalable and affordable solution for energy consumption monitoring in wireless networks. The Energino power meter is a standalone plug-load meter based on the Arduino platform providing high resolution and sampling rate capabilities. We evaluate the capabilities and distinctive features of the Energino power meter in a real WLAN network. Results show that our solution is capable of isolating high resolution/frequency dynamics that can not be analyzed using commercially available tools. We also release both the hardware schematics and the software with a permissive license in order to encourage the research community to use and extend it.