Energy modelling of embedded multimedia streaming applications with GStreamer on heterogeneous MPSoC

Embedded systems have to support more and more demanding multimedia applications. Heterogeneous multi-core architectures are now commonplace in mobile electronic devices. The impact on the power and energy consumption is tremendous; it has to be evaluated as soon as possible in the design process. Multimedia development frameworks are used to abstract the complexity of the hardware to the designer. In this paper, we propose a methodology to develop high-level performance and consumption models for multimedia streaming applications based on the GStreamer framework. Our approach is based on measurements of the power consumptions and execution times during the processing of combined video and audio streams. Performance and consumption models are build for various plugins instantiated in the corresponding GStreamer pipelines. The combination of estimations for all those plugins leads to a precise evaluation of the complete plugin performances. The precision of the models is evaluated against measurements for different real-life streaming applications.