Estimating energy consumption of Wifi transceiver circuits on a single board computer

Sammanfattning: This work comprises an approximation of the energy consumption of the transceiver circuit in a single board computer. Single board computers, such as the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B that is used here, are usually cheap and therefore more accessible. This method of estimation does not use any other hardware which gives it an advantage compared to many other methods that use expensive measurement equipment, but it unfortunately comes with certain trade-offs, like accuracy, to name one example. One area where this approximation method could be applied is for optimizing the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks. The method can be divided into two main parts, firstly the transceiver’s active transmission and reception states are profiled and then a power model is chosen and adapted to suit the transceiver as well as possible. These two steps are then combined and results in an energy consumption approximation. The evaluation of the results showed that the estimations are reasonable according to the most relevant findings on measuring a similar transceiver circuit, but there are also limitations that brings uncertainty to the results. More relevant studies are needed to properly assess the method of estimation and some further improvements are suggested.