Characterizing system level energy consumption in mobile computing platforms

This paper approaches energy consumption characterization in mobile computing platforms by assessing energy consumption of "basic" application-level tasks, such as processing, input/output (disk, display, etc.), communication (transmission and reception over the network), and combinations thereof. Besides providing information on the energy consumption behavior of typical tasks performed by mobile computers, task-level energy characterization enables power management decisions, such as whether, in a distributed computation, the task at hand can be executed locally or should be assigned to a different machine (given the machine's current energy budget, the energy cost of executing the task locally, and the cost of sending the required information over the network to a peer). We employ a task-level energy consumption characterization benchmark that accounts for basic tasks such as processing, disk access (including reads and writes), terminal usage, and communication (transmission and reception). Using the benchmark, we perform an energy characterization case study using the Dell Latitude C600 running two versions of the Linux operating system.