Quanto: tracking energy in networked embedded systems

  • Authors:

  • Rodrigo Fonseca;Prabal Dutta;Philip Levis;Ion Stoica

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA and Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, CA;Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;Computer Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • OSDI'08 Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We present Quanto, a network-wide time and energy profiler for embedded network devices. By combining well-defined interfaces for hardware power states, fast high-resolution energy metering, and causal tracking of programmer-defined activities, Quanto can map how energy and time are spent on nodes and across a network. Implementing Quanto on the TinyOS operating system required modifying under 350 lines of code and adding 1275 new lines. We show that being able to take fine-grained energy consumption measurements as fast as reading a counter allows developers to precisely quantify the effects of low-level system implementation decisions, such as using DMA versus direct bus operations, or the effect of external interference on the power draw of a low duty-cycle radio. Finally, Quanto is lightweight enough that it has a minimal effect on system behavior: each sample takes 100 CPU cycles and 12 bytes of RAM.