The development of hardware platforms for sensing
applications and the design of energy-efficient protocols for data
gathering are typically viewed as separate tasks. In many cases,
communication engineers decide on the protocol specification
based on high-level hardware abstractions, which assume that
the radio transmission block is the top spender of electrical
power. However, a closer inspection of the existing technology
immediately reveals that this assumption does not hold for the
majority of sensor platforms currently available in the market.
To help close this gap, we propose a new hardware abstraction
for protocol design that takes into consideration all of the main
energy spending operations. Our preliminary results confirm that
(a) the same protocol can have very different energy consumption profiles over different sensor platforms and (b) slight changes to the protocols using the proposed hardware abstraction can lead to significant energy gains over a wider range of sensor platforms. The latter findings are supported by real-life measurements, where network coding is implemented using common sensor motes.