Energy analysis for internet of things software: A simulator approach

This Letter reports a method to obtain fine-grained energy consumption analysis of programs running on the low-power internet of things (IoT) devices. In the energy estimation domain, most state-of-the-art solutions focus on the coarse-grained approach to monitor the energy consumption of a device or an application. However, few solutions addressed energy monitoring to analyse fine-grained energy consumption of a program, especially for IoT appliances. Therefore, the authors present a fine-grained gem5-based energy profiling tool to help developers to evaluate the energy efficiency of hot spots in their programs. The authors demonstrate its usability by applying it to profiling garbage collection and property lookup in Jerryscript, a JavaScript engine specifically designed for resource-constrained IoT devices, and discover that these two operations are consuming, as they account for 17.67 and 12.26% of total energy, respectively. Therefore, this tool can aid the developers to gain insight into the energy efficiency of their software.