Analysis on the Current Consumption of Applying the Huffman Codification for Data Transmission using the ESP-NOW Protocol

Abstract

IoT devices have restrictions regarding their energy consumption. Their hardware allows them to consume less energy to work for long periods of time with a small battery. Research works that are aimed at decreasing energy consumption, focus on the device hardware components, while other research focus on transmission algorithms to reduce the number of transmissions. In this context compression algorithms play an important role in reducing the amount of data to transmit. The Huffman codification is very easy to understand and has many source codes available. Therefore, this research focuses on quantifying the amount of energy saved after applying the Huffman codification. The tests were performed using the ESP32 which has an integrated Wi-Fi radio; and has the ESP-NOW protocol to transmit data between two devices without too much hardware setup. The results show that as more data is compressed the device energy consumption tends to reduce by 2 mA after continuous transmissions. The final energy consumption value is similar to the device current consumption while processing data.