Application-level prediction of battery dissipation

Abstract

Mobile, battery-powered devices such as personal digital assistants and web-enabled mobile phones have successfully emerged as new access points to the world's digital infrastructure. However, the growing gap between device capabilities and battery technology requires novel techniques that extend battery life. Key to the success of such techniques, is our ability to accurately predict the power consumption of a program. In this paper we investigate the degree to which battery dissipation induced by program execution can be measured by application-level software tools and predicted by a compiler and runtime system. We present a novel technique with which we can accurately estimate whole-program power-consumption for an arbitrary program by composing battery dissipation rates of benchmarks. We empirically evaluate our technique using an iPAQ hand-held device and a number of MiBench and other programs.