The Master’s thesis analyzes energy consumption of WiFi modules, which
serve to connect devices pertaining to the Internet of Things with the internet. In the
context of the thesis, I have reviewed over 200 WiFi modules online and reduced the
number of modules to 28 according to certain criteria outlined beforehand. Of the
remaining 28 WiFi modules, I selected 4 that I have thoroughly examined and used
for various measurements. For measurement purposes, I connected the modules with
a test environment via an SPI interface and implemented the necessary software
drivers on the microcontroller with ARM architecture. To measure energy
consumption, I used a digital flow meter with a sampling frequency up to 20 kHz and
an accuracy of the 300 μA order, for which I implemented a library in the Python
programming language. I concentrated on the energy consumption using WPA2
encryption, since data security is always of utmost importance. The results of the
measurements have shown that despite having comparable specifications, WiFi
modules differ greatly between different manufacturers in terms of actual energy
consumption. Additionally, the complexity of controlling WiFi modules also varies
from manufacturer to manufacturer, which affects costs and development time.
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