Energy Consumption Measurement Systems for Embedded Devices

Due to sustainability, environmental protection and user convenience, energy efficiency is becoming one of the primary issues in the design and use of electronic devices, especially in embedded and mobile devices (such as mobile phones and tablets). Having accurate information about power draw and energy consumption for these devices is beneficial for the system software developers to optimise the system services and for application developers to optimise the end-user applications. This paper explores the existing solutions for measuring instantaneous power and energy consumption of heterogeneous multicore processors, comparing the accuracy, adaptability and cost-effectiveness of these solutions on different workloads and different classes of devices (single-board computers and mobile devices). We evaluate both hardware and software measuring systems and make recommendations as to which system to use on which class of devices.