Energy and power consumption estimation for embedded applications and operating systems

This paper presents a methodology that permits to estimate the power and energy consumption of embedded applications. Estimation is performed from high-level specifications of the complete system. Power models are built from physical measurements on the hardware platform. Operating system's services are modeled: scheduler/timer interrupt, inter-process communications, devices accesses models are presented. The operating system's energy overhead is expressed as the sum of multiple contributions related to services activated during a run. Our methodology is applied to the modeling of a Xillinx Virtex-II Pro XUP platform, and a Linux 2.6 operating system. The comparison of consumption estimations and measurements for different versions of a multi-threaded MJPEG application shows an error ranging from 1% to 11%. Our methodology and power models have been integrated in a CAD tool, named CAT (Consumption Analysis Toolbox), deployed in the Eclipse IDE and also included in the Open Source AADL Tool Environment, bringing energy estimation capabilities in the AADL design flow.