Power consumption is recognized to be one of the key design parameters towards the deployment of effective and fully operational wireless sensor networks. Many studies and efforts are currently under way for developing better power management strategies. Towards this end, various simulation tools are being developed for enabling the analysis of the impact of various system parameters over the energy required by the various system elements of a wireless sensor network. In this paper, we focus on the simulation of power consumption management based on the principles of cross-layer protocol engineering. We start by reviewing the most relevant work on the area of simulators of wireless sensor networks focusing mainly on those tools offering capabilities for evaluating the power consumption. Thereafter, based on the principles of cross-layer protocol engineering, we study the interaction between the various layers by focusing on the study of power-aware network architectures. Throughout an exhaustive campaign of simulations, we compare various protocol architecture configurations in terms of their power saving capabilities. Copyright 2006 ACM.