Design and Implementation of a Framework for Automatic Measurement of Embedded-Software Energy Consumption in an XScale Platform

Embedded systems are becoming more and more important in today’s life in many ways. They can be found in dishwashers, mobile phones, coffee machines, PDAs, etc. Although there is no common definition of what an embedded system is, it can be generally defined as a special-purpose information processing system, containing both: software and hardware. Embedded systems are integrated in a larger systems which interact with environment for achieving a set of predefined tasks or applications. In general, embedded systems are characterized by resources scarcity, among which energy is becoming more and more important (especially the energy consumed by the processor). The energy consumed by an embedded system is strongly influenced by the software running on it (the embedded software). That is why it is crucial to explore the software characteristics that have an influence on the energy consumption, and to understand how this influence could be represented. In order to realize this task, there is a need for the construction of a reliable measurement platform for energy consumption by embedded devices. The target of this work is to design and implement a framework for measuring energy consumption of embedded software. This framework is based on the XScale architecture, a popular Intel platform designed for energy aware applications. The framework has a software repository which contains a number of programs (user-defined) that are supposed to run on the mentioned platform. These program codes are the input of the framework. Automated measurements for energy consumption are performed on all programs for gathering the required information. In the context of this work, a first evaluation of the framework was performed to make an initial check its quality