Energy efficiency is a key aspect when designing and optimizing contemporary wireless networks and transceivers. Assessment of energy efficiency requires proper energy consumption models. The most common solutions are to measure a single device and propose a device-specific model or to propose a simplified model for many transceivers but not reflecting all phenomena visible in a given transceiver energy consumption. Therefore, it has to be selected to accurately model a single transceiver or coarsely model a wide group of transceivers. This paper proposes a new approach, where a fixed energy consumption model is used but with parameters being random variables. This reflects variability between various transceivers from various vendors. First the model parameters are adjusted separately for each of 14 measured WiFi modems. These devices are treated as samples of a wider population of devices and their parameters are used for stochastic parameters modeling, i.e., choosing the random variables' distributions, their parameters, and the correlation among parameters. The proposed model can be used, e.g., for system-level network design where variability among transceivers power consumption can be used as a new degree of freedom. The paper presents simulation results for a simple multi-hop link whose energy consumption is characterized in much more detail thanks to the proposed stochastic power consumption model.
Keywords: hardware measurements; power consumption; system level simulations; wireless transceivers.