Energy modeling for mobile devices using performance counters

The increasing complexity of mobile applications coupled with growing user demands lead to rapid battery drain in mobile devices. However, battery technology cannot keep up with these trends thus making power management one of the foremost concerns. While system-level approaches to power management exist, the energy impact of applications on individual system components needs to be better understood for energy efficient system design. In this work, we develop energy models for mobile devices using performance counters and estimate the power consumption of system components for numerous embedded applications. Our models provide enhancements in I/O towards estimating I/O energy and cache to incorporate energy consumed during cache refill and write-back in the energy estimation process. We further compare our power estimates with existing models and demonstrate the uniqueness of our model.