Toward Energy Profiling of Connected Embedded Systems

A huge number of connected objects are expected to be deployed over the coming years in various areas of everyday life. Many of these objects are energy-constrained and depend on a battery. Thus, energy is a critical resource that limits a large scale deployment, and greatly complicates the development of the embedded software on these objects. Hence, the ability to measure and finely profile the power consumption of such devices, and correlate it with the on-board application is a big challenge to improve the software development. Furthermore, common energy patterns can be extracted from the collected energy figures in order to provide guidelines allowing a proactive energy-based development. In this paper, we present an ongoing work about a lightweight framework for energy profiling of embedded applications source code at a functional granularity. It is driven by an on-line hardware-based measurement technique permitting to gather accurate energy figures. The framework is integrated into an energy-centric iterative development cycle allowing fast revaluations of the energy consumed by the targeted functions after each source code modification. Afterwards, we describe our future works about overcoming an unlocked state of art issue relative to asynchronous energy consumption profiling.