Component-Level Energy Consumption Estimation for Distributed Java-Based Software Systems

Efficiency with respect to energy consumption has increasingly been recognized as an important quality attribute for distributed software systems in embedded and pervasive environments. In this paper we present a framework for estimating the energy consumption of distributed software systems implemented in Java. Our primary objective in devising the framework is to enable an engineer to make informed decisions when adapting a system’s architecture, such that the energy consumption on hardware devices with a finite battery life is reduced, and the lifetime of the system’s key software services increases. Our framework explic itly takes a component-based perspective, which renders it well suited for a large class of today’s distributed, embedded, and pervasive applications. The framework allows the engineer to estimate the distributed system’s energy consumption at sys tem construction-time and refine it at runtime. In a large number of distributed application scenarios, the framework showed very good precision on the whole, giving results that were within 5% (and often less) of the actual energy consump tion incurred by executing the software. Our work to date has also highlighted the framework’s practical applications and a number of possible enhancements.