MofySim: A mobile full-system simulation framework for energy consumption and performance analysis

Abstract

The analysis of energy consumption and performance is essential to design and optimize mobile systems because of their limited battery capacity. Full-system simulation provides detailed performance metrics for an entire system. Thus it has been widely used for designing and optimizing microarchitectures and mobile systems. The gem5 simulator provides full-system simulation based on the ARM architecture and Android for mobile systems. However, gem5 for mobile systems does not support wireless network interfaces and can not configure various networking environments such as network errors and network types. Furthermore, gem5 provides only performance statistics without power consumption data. This paper presents a mobile full-system simulation framework based on an enhanced gem5 that includes a simulated mobile system, a simulated server system, and a simulated Ethernet, which enables us to configure various networking environments, in addition to power models for the main components of mobile systems: CPU/caches, DRAM, network interfaces, and display. Using mobile applications and SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks, we show that the proposed mobile full-system simulator achieves performance accuracy within 26.8% error rate for various network packet loss rates, and power modeling accuracy within 12.8% error rate, compared with Nexus 5. This mobile full-system simulator considering the real networking environments provides the energy consumption and performance analysis of not only hardware components, but also application processes and threads at the same time. We also discovered energy-inefficient tasks and the inefficiency of the DVFS ondemand governor on network delays using the proposed mobile full-system simulation framework.