Analysis of energy consumption and optimization techniques for writing energy-efficient code

Abstract

The unprecedented growth of connected devices, together with the remarkable convergence of a wide variety of technologies, have led to an exponential increase in the services that the internet of things (IoT) can offer, all aimed at improving quality of life. Consequently, in order to meet the numerous challenges this produces, the IoT has become a major subject of research. One of these challenges is the reduction of energy consumption given the significant limitations of some devices. In addition, although the search for energy efficiency was initially focused on hardware, it has become a concern for software developers too. In fact, it has become an intense area of research with the principal objective of analyzing and optimizing the energy consumption of software systems. This research analyzes the energy saving that can be achieved when using a broad set of techniques for writing energy-efficient code for Raspberry Pi devices. It also demonstrates that programmers can save more energy if they apply the proposed techniques manually than when relying on other automatic optimization options offered by the GNU compiler collection (GCC). Thus, it is important that programmers are aware of the significant impact these techniques can have on an application’s energy consumption.