Characterizing Mote Performance: A Vector-Based Methodology

Sensors networks instrument the physical space using motes that run network embedded programs thus acquiring, processing, storing and transmitting sensor data. The motes commercially available today are large, costly and trade performance for flexibility and ease of programming. New generations of motes are promising to deliver significant improvements in terms of power consumption and price — in particular motes based on System-on-a-chip. The question is how do we compare mote performance? How to find out which mote is best suited for a given application? In this paper, we propose a vector-based methodology for benchmarking mote performance. Our method is based on the hypothesis that mote performance can be expressed as the scalar product of two vectors, one representing the mote characteristics, and the other representing the application characteristics. We implemented our approach in TinyOS 2.0 and we present the details of our implementation as well as the result of experiments obtained on commercial motes from Sensinode. We give a quantitative comparison of these motes, and predict the performance of a data acquisition application.