Energy profiling as a service

Abstract

Energy optimization of software systems has emerged as one of the biggest challenges for the development of future software applications. Especially the efficiency of mobile applications has become a major driver, as limited battery capacities force applications to cause as few energy consumption as possible to increase the devices' uptimes. Although many research groups have investigated approaches to energy optimization of mobile applications, still, each group is building and using its own methodology to evaluate the impact of their optimizations on the devices' energy consumption. This variety of different evaluation methodologies hinders the reproducibility of individual research group's findings as well as their comparability with similar research results. In this paper, we propose profiling as a service by exposing a hardware-based energy profiling infrastructure as a web service reusable for other research groups and application developers. We discuss possible use cases for our profiling service as well as limitations. Besides, we present its transparent integration into software development tools such as Eclipse.