Development of energy-efficient protocols and algorithms requires in-depth understanding of the power consumption characteristics of real world devices. To this aim, energy efficiency analysis is performed by the research community, mainly focusing on the development of power consumption models. However, recent studies [1] have highlighted the inability of existing models to accurately estimate energy consumption even in non-composite scenarios, where the operation of a single device is analyzed. The inability of such models is further highlighted under real life scenarios, where the impact induced by the simultaneous operation of several devices renders the application of traditional models completely inappropriate. As a result, energy efficiency evaluation under complex configurations and topologies, needs to be experimentally investigated through the application of online monitoring solutions. In this work, we propose the innovative NITOS Energy consumption Monitoring Framework (EMF) able to support online monitoring of energy expenditure, along with the experiment execution. The developed framework is built on a distributed network of low-cost, but highly accurate devices and is fully integrated with the large-scale wireless NITOS testbed. Framework evaluation is performed under both low-level experiments that demonstrate the platform's high-level accuracy, as well as through high-level experiments that showcase how online and distributed monitoring can facilitate energy performance assessment of realistic testbed experiments.

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Over the last decade, the IEEE 802.11 has emerged as the most popular protocol in the wireless domain. Since the release of the first standard version, several amendments have been introduced in an effort to improve its throughput performance, with the most recent one being the IEEE 802.11n extension. In this paper, we present experimentally obtained results that evaluate the energy efficiency of the base standard in comparison with the latest 802.11n version, under a wide range of settings. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to provide such a detailed comparative analysis on the performance of both standards. The followed power measurement methodology is based on custombuilt hardware that enables online energy consumption evaluation at both the wireless transceiver and the total node levels. Based on in-depth interpretation of the collected results, we remark that the latest standard enables significant improvement of energy efficiency, when combined with standard compliant frame aggregation mechanisms. Our detailed findings can act as guidelines for researchers working on the design of energy efficient wireless protocols.