Profiling Energy Consumption of I/O Functions in Embedded Applications

Abstract

I/O operations consume a significant portion of energy of an embedded system. To profile the energy consumption of I/O requests issued by a specific application helps developers to understand the energy consumption of the software and to further optimize the energy efficiency of the designs. However, most of the existing energy profiling tools concentrate on the energy consumption analyses of processors and memory, and provide limited supports to associate the energy consumption of an I/O device with high-level I/O function calls. In this paper, we propose and implement a generic framework, called energy profiling module (EPROM), which can estimate the energy consumption of I/O requests in application processes. The experimental results based on two typical I/O devices, i.e. WLAN and TFT-LCD, demonstrate that our proposed framework can provide accurate estimates on the energy consumption of I/O function calls and the errors between the estimation and measurement results are below 4%.