Energy Consumption Analysis of ZigBee-Based

Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Jiaying Song and Yen Kheng Tan
Energy Research Institute
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 637553
{jysong, tanyk}@ntu.edu.sg

Alonso et al have investigated the main parameters including

duty cycles, data processing and wireless data transmission
power and data sensing power using ZigBee EM2420 RF
module. In [8], the energy consumption of sensor nodes in
transmission and receiving mode is experimented via CC2420.
Unfortunately, there are still other parameters need to be
considered.

AbstractEnergy consumption is one of the most important

practical properties for deploying an energy harvesting wireless
sensor network. This paper presents the energy consumption
analysis of ZigBee-based energy harvesting wireless sensor
networks to understand the energy requirements to the energy
harvesting technologies from a practical aspect. Three kinds of
energy consumption are analyzed to investigate the main factors
influencing the design of energy harvesting technology: the
energy consumption of end devices and of routers in power up
mode, the energy consumption of data transmission with/without
application acknowledgement requirements, and the energy
consumption of routers supporting different node density. Based
on the measurements, the key metrics influencing the lifetime of
wireless sensor networks are summarized and an energy
consumption model is proposed to evaluate the lifetime of a
sensor node. Moreover, the potential energy-saving solutions are
discussed for ZigBee-based energy harvesting wireless sensor
networks.
Keywords-wireless
sensor
networks;
consumption measurement; energy harvesting

I.

ZigBee;

1) Energy consumption in power up mode. When the

sensor nodes or routers power up, they needs high energy in a
short period. That is critical for designing the energy havesting
part for the wireless sensor network.
2) Energy consumption of reporting data with application
acknowledgement requirements. In some critical monitoring
applications, the sensor nodes need to make sure the
coordinator or the access point receives the packets correctly.
Other than the media access control (MAC) layer
acknowledgement that can only indicate the receive status of
the raw MAC packet, ZigBee specifies the application layer
acknowledgement to help a sensor node know whether the
packets it sent was received by the coordinator without any
error. But the sensor node needs to set its status idle and to
wait for dozens of or hundreds of milliseconds before
requesting application acknowledgement. The waiting process
consumes much energy and shorts the whole network lifetime.
3) Energy consumption of routers. A ZigBee-based
wireless sensor network consists of a coordinator served as the
gateway or the sink node, several routers and lots of end
devices (i.e. sensor nodes). The connectivity of the network is
maintained by the multi-hop communications among the
routers and each sensor node is connected to a router via onehop transmission, which means if a router runs out of power,
many sensors may be unable to report data to the coordinator.
As a consequence, like the energy consumption of sensor
nodes, the routers energy consumption also determines the
lifetime of the network.
In this paper, we measure the energy consumption in
ZigBee-based energy harvesting wireless sensor networks. The
energy consumptions in power up mode, of reporting data with
and without application acknowledgement, and of routers are
experimented. Especially, the influence of node density on
routers energy consumption is experimented. Furthermore,

energy

INTRODUCTION

ZigBee is a network and application layer specification for

low-power radio devices based on IEEE 802.15.4 standards. It
has been widely used in the deployment of wireless sensor
networks. Due to the mesh networking, ZigBee can provide
high reliability and extensive range for wireless sensor
networks. Therefore, it gains much attention both in
commercial and academic area.
Energy harvesting technologies are expected to provide
stable energy for wireless sensor networks. An energy
harvester converts various types of environmental energy into
electricity and stores the energy to be applied to a sensor node.
However, since the energy-producing rate at the harvester is
limited, the energy consumption analysis plays an important
role to the capacity design of energy harvesting technologies
[1]. In addition, energy consumption is also the most critical
metric influencing the lifetime of wireless sensor networks [2].
The theoretical energy or power consumption models are
useful to simulate the performance of wireless sensor networks
while having little contribution to real application [3]-[5].
Recently, several energy consumption measurements have
proposed. In [6], the total energy consumption of a sensor node
is measured by the CC1000 integrated radio circuit. In [7], J.

978-1-4673-2054-2/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

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Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE ICCS

find a router or gateway by receiving data continuously. Once

the sensor node detects the existence of a router or gateway, it
enters in network access process and starts communicating
with the router or the gateway periodically. In the power up
process, the maximum current consumption of the sensor node
is 0.206 A. The time spending in network access process is
3.0354 s.

some energy-saving solutions are discussed based on the

measurement results.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II
presents the measurement model. Section III and Section IV
propose the energy consumption of sensor nodes and routers,
respectively. The potential energy-saving solutions are given in
Section V. Section VI is the conclusions.
II.

It can be concluded that the total energy consumption

spending for power up and accessing the networking is 0.1616
J even without any interference and rejection. When there are
multiple sensor nodes powering up at the same time or there
are multiple routers surrounding the sensor nodes, the energy
consumption will become larger because of interference. This
vast energy requirements in a very short time needs to be fully
considered before designing the network protocol and energy
harvesting technologies.

THE EXPERIMENTAL MODEL

The network model for the energy experiment is illustrated

in Fig. 1. Fig. 1(a) shows the topology used for measuring the
energy consumption of a sensor node. The sensor node reports
the data to the gateway periodically. When the sensor node
achieves the reporting, it goes to sleep mode immediately. Fig.
1(b) is the topology for the energy consumption
experimentation of a router. The router sends a data request
message every 2 minutes. In ZigBee-based wireless sensor
networks, the routers keep receiving without going to sleep
when they finish the data transmission because routers form a
wireless mesh backhaul to maintain the connectivity of the
whole network.

0.2
0.18

Current Consumption (A)

0.16
0.14
0.12
0.1
0.08
0.06
0.04
0.02
0
0

0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

Time (s)

Figure 1. Wireless sensor network model for energy consumption

measurement

Figure 3. Current consumption of a sensor node during power up mode in

ZigBee-based energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

The hardware model used in the measurement is CC2530

ZigBee development kit [9] shown in Fig. 2. There are 7 nodes
working in 2.4GHz and equipped with IEEE 802.15.4 and
ZigBee protocols. The energy harvester is responsible for
supplying energy for the sensor nodes and routers.

B. Energy Consumption of Sensor Nodes Reporting Data

With/Without Application Acknowledgement Requirements
We evaluate the energy consumption of a sensor node
with/without application acknowledgement requirements. In an
alarm or security system, the wireless sensor network needs to
monitor critical parameters. Hence, it is crucial that the
recipient receives all transmitted packets. In such cases, the
wireless sensor networks need end-to-end acknowledgement
and bio-direction communications, which cost much more
energy.

Enhanced 8051 MCU

Battery / Energy
Storage

As shown in Fig. 4, the upper figure shows the current

consumption spending for reporting a message to its associated
router and receiving the related MAC acknowledgement
message and this process needs 4.6710-4 J of energy and takes
0.0107 s of time.

Energy Harvester

Figure 2. Current consumption of a sensor node during power up in ZigBeebased energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

III.

The lower figure in Fig.4 discusses the current consumption

of reporting a message with the application acknowledgement
requirement. As shown in Fig. 5, the application
acknowledgement is the reply from the receiver of an
application layer packet, saying that the recipient received the
packet with no errors. In this case, the sensor nodes have to

ENERGY CONSUMPTION ANALYSIS FOR SENSOR NODES

A. Energy Consumption of Sensor Nodes in Power Up Mode

Fig. 3 shows the current consumption of a sensor node
working in power up mode without any interference. When a
sensor node is turn on, it turns the transceiver on and tries to

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Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE ICCS

request the acknowledgement packet from the receiver after

having transmitted the packet. It must also need to wait before
sending the request message until the recipient has actually
received the packet. The waiting time depends heavily on the
system and number of hops. The default wait time is set to
100ms. This process consumes 4.510-3 J of energy and takes
0.1266 s of time.

C. Lifetime of Sensor Nodes

According to the above measurements, the power up
process and the transceiving process are the major parts that
determine the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Tab. 1 lists
the parameters influencing the lifetime of a sensor node and
thereby influencing the lifetime of the wireless sensor networks
separately.

It is obvious that the data report with application

acknowledgement requirements consumes 10 times of energy
than the report only with MAC acknowledgement requirements
does. Therefore, if the energy harvesting wireless sensor
networks are applied in critical event monitoring which needs
to support end-to-end acknowledgement and has time delay
requirements, it is necessary to design a more efficient end-toend acknowledgement scheduling scheme and to provide a
energy convertor with higher performance to produce more
energy to support the operation of the network.

TABLE I.

ENERGY CONSUMPTION MODEL

Current
Consumption

Operations

Time

Waking up
Setting up the radio, dealing with the
packet through ZigBee stack, and
preparing for transmission

Receiving

Data

MAC acknowledgement

APP acknowledgement

Listen

Switching from receiving mode to

transmission mode
Transmiss
ion

Data

MAC acknowledgement

Data request

Switching from transmission mode to

receiving mode
Waiting to request the application
acknowledgement when a sensor node
enters an IDLE state
Preparing to sleep
------

Sleeping
Figure 4. Current consumption of a sensor node that reports the data
messages in ZigBee-based energy harvesting wireless sensor networks
Sensor Node

Router
DATA
MAC ACK

Router

DATA
MAC ACK

1) Lifetime of Sensor Nodes Reporting Data only with

MAC Aknowledgement Requirements
The time and average current taken by transmitting a data
message with MAC acknowledgement requirement correctly
are

Gateway

DATA
MAC ACK

,
_

DATA
MAC ACK
APP ACK
MAC ACK

APP ACK
MAC ACK

,
,

APP ACK
MAC ACK

Assuming that the battery capacity is

mAh and the
sensor node reports a data message every seconds, the
lifetime of a sensor node is

Request APP ACK

MAC ACK
APP ACK
MAC ACK

Once a wireless sensor network is deployed, the current

consumption of each operation is fixed, whereas the time of
each operation is variable. For example,
, might be very
large since before a sensor node can transmit data reporting

Figure 5. Process of reproting data with application acknowledgement (APP

ACK) in ZigBee-based energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

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Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE ICCS

is small. The average current consumption of a router is 0.363

A. The maximum current is 0.447 A.

message, it might need to listen for a very long time because of

interference caused by sleeping scheduling scheme the network
uses.
2) Lifetime of Sensor Nodes Reporting Data with
Application Acknowledgement Requirements
In critical event monitoring, due to the data request, waiting
to request the application acknowledgement, and APP
acknowledgement receiving, data reporting with application
acknowledgement requirement consumes more energy
compare with data reporting only with MAC acknowledgement
requirement. Therefore, the time and average current taken by
transmitting a data message with MAC acknowledgement
requirement correctly become to
_

0.09

Current Consumption (A)

0.08

0.06
0.05
0.04

0.02

,
0.01

,
_

0.07

0.03

0.1

,
,

0
0.4

,
,

0.6

0.8

1
Time (s)

1.2

1.4

1.6

Figure 6. Current consumption of a router during power up in ZigBee-based

energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

The lifetime of a sensor node will be

0.044

0.042

Therefore, if there is interference in the network, the

network will consume more energy not only because of the
but also the increasing of
increasing of
, .

Current Consumption (A)

IV.

0.04

ENERGY COMSUMPTION ANALYSIS FOR ROUTERS

A. Current Consumption of Routers in Power Up Mode

The current consumption of a router working in power up
mode without any interference is illustrated in Fig. 6. When a
router is turned on, it begins preparing the configuration firstly,
and then turns the transceiver on and tries to find a router or
gateway by keep receiving data. Once the router detects the
existence of other routers or gateway, it enters in network
access process and starts communicating with the target router
or the gateway.

0.038

0.036

0.034

0.032

0.03
average current consumption
maximum current consumption

0.028
0

1
2
3
4
Node Density (Number of nodes surround one router)

Figure 7. Average current consumption of a routerd that report the data

regularly in ZigBee-based energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

The total energy consumption spending for power up and

accessing the network is 0.0566 J. Without any interference
and rejection, the time that network access process takes is
1.0461 s. The maximum current consumption is 0.1015 A.
Noted that the energy consumption during power up of a router
is smaller than that of a sensor node.

V. ENERGY-SAVING SOLUTION DISCUSSION

The analyses in Section IV B shows that the energy
consumption of routers is stable and node density has less
impact on the energy consumption of routers, but there still are
two metrics bring design challenges to deployment of ZigBeebased wireless sensor networks, especially to energy harvesting
technologies: Power up mode and reporting data with
application acknowledgement requirements. 1) For a sensor
node, the power up mode consumes over 35 times more energy
than one duty cycle with application acknowledgement
requirement does, which means the energy consumption is 340
times as much as that of one duty cycle without application
acknowledgement requirement. Moreover, the power up mode
of a router node consumes 3 times less energy than that of a
sensor node does. 2) For a sensor node, the energy

B. Energy Consumption of Routers After Power Up

Fig. 7 shows the average current consumption when a
router forwards the data message for sensor nodes. The node
density is the number of the nodes that are associated with a
router. The node density has less influence on the average
current consumption, which means the average energy
consumption does not change as the number of sensor nodes
grows. It is because in ZigBee-based wireless sensor network
all routers have no sleep status and stay in receiving status if
they do not need to transmit data. In addition, the difference
between the current consumption of transmission and receiving

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Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE ICCS

consumption of reporting data with/without application

acknowledgement requirements differs a lot.

VI. CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents the energy consumption analysis of
ZigBee-based energy harvesting wireless sensor networks.
Practical measurements are employed to investigate three main
metrics influencing the network design: energy consumption in
power up mode, energy consumption of reporting data with
application acknowledgement requirements, and energy
consumption of routers. The measurement results show that
node density has little impact on the energy consumption of
routers and the most important challenges to energy harvesting
technology are on the first two metrics. Moreover, An energy
consumption model is proposed to evaluate the lifetime of a
sensor node. Based on the analysis, the potential energy-saving
solutions are discussed for ZigBee-based energy harvesting
wireless sensor networks.

For an energy harvesting wireless sensor networks, the

energy storage is limited. Therefore, energy-saving solutions
need to be designed to make sure the stability and to decrease
the uncertainties. Based on the proposed energy consumption
analyses, the potential energy-saving solutions including:
1) Energy-saving access control. As shown in Fig. 3, a
sensor node needs over 3 seconds to detect a router and to
accomplish the entwork access even there is no interference in
the network. Also, this value could become larger once the
node density increases. Moreover, if the sensor node finds
multiple routers, the access time will be longer and the access
process consumes more energy. The power up mode makes it
hard to design the energy harvesting technology because the
instantaneous energy requirement is very high. A novel access
control method that can short the access time for sensor nodes
will be a useful solution to inprove the efficiency of energy
harvesting technology.
2) Energy-saving sleeping schedule. For critical event
monitoring, as illustrated in Fig. 4, when a sensor node reports
data with application acknowledgement to the gateway, the
waiting process consumes much energy and it cannot be
tolerated in low-power wireless sensor networks. Hence, an
energy saving sleeping scheduling scheme that can ensure low
energy consumption for the sensor nodes is expected. As
given in Fig. 8, if there is an energy saving sleeping schedule
can be proposed to make the sensor node exactly know when
the application acknowledgement message from the gateway
is received by its associated router, the sensor node can go to
sleep after reporting the data and turn on its transceiver after
the router recives the acknolwdegement. The whole process
consumes 2.110-3 J of energy, which is only half of the
energy shown in Fig. 4.

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0.04

0.035

Current Consumption (A)

0.03

0.025

0.02

0.015

0.01

0.005

0.02

0.04

0.06

0.08

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0.12

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Time(s)

Figure 8. Current consumption of a sensor node that reports the data

messages using a ideal scheduling in ZigBee-based energy harvesting wireless
sensor networks

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