ARA Power APIs

Similar to Weather APIs, ARA offers experimenters options to retrieve and analyze the energy consumption of components involved in their experiments or study communication systems behavior from an energy-consumption perspective.

At present, ARA offers APIs for collecting power-related data from 4 Base Station (BS) sites and from Sandbox. At first, we provide APIs for the overall power consumption of BS sites. We plan to add additional APIs for the fine-grained energy measurements soon involving options to select individual components at the sites. The power related attributes provided by the APIs are shown in the table below.

Power-related parameters
Serial No.	Parameter	Unit
1	Load Amps	Ampere
2	Load VA	Volt-ampere
3	Load Watts	Watts

Using the ARA Power Module

The arawireless Python library offers a single solution to generic ARA measurement APIs including weather and power. The steps for using power-related APIs are as follows:

Launch a container of your choice, for example, as shown in the Hello World experiment.
Install dependencies and ARA Wireless Python library
- Install the dependencies git and pip.
```
# apt update
# apt install python3-pip git
```
- Install the arawireless Python library:
```
# pip install git+https://gitlab.com/aralab/arasoft/arawireless.git
```
Use the following instructions in either Python shell or within your Python script for extracting the power consumption of a deployment site. An example usage from the Python shell is shown below. Run the following commands in the container shell.
```
# python3
>>> from arapower import power
>>> power_data = power.get_current_aggregate_power(['WilsonHall'])
>>> print(power_data)
```
You can retrieve weather data from multiple sites using the same function as follows:
```
>>> power_data = power.get_current_aggregate_power(['WilsonHall', 'AgFarm'])
>>> print(power_data)
```
The function get_current_aggregate_power() returns the energy consumption at the current time in a Python dictionary.