Architectural tactics for energy efficiency: Review of the literature and research roadmap

Abstract

The energy consequences of software are rapidly growing: at the high-end, server farms consume enormous amounts of energy; at the low-end there is ever-increasing reliance on battery-powered mobile and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. However, there has been little attention to how software architectures can be designed for energy efficiency. While other software qualities such as performance or availability have been extensively studied, there is little research on how to reason about energy-consumption as a first-class quality. We provide a basis for reasoning about design decisions for energy efficiency by deriving a set of reusable architectural tactics derived from the research literature, via a taxonomic literature review. We used an open-search and snowballing methodology to obtain primary studies, and then used thematic coding to identify commonalities among the design strategies described. The result of this process is a taxonomy of 10 architectural tactics for energy efficiency. These tactics provide a rational basis for architectural design and analysis for energy efficiency.