Creating and Evaluating a Software Power Model for Linux Single Board Computers

The number of Single Board Computers (SBCs) is increasing, and so is the cumulative energy consumed by this category of device. Moreover, such devices are often always-on or running on batteries. Therefore, it is worth investigating their energy consumption to provide software developers and users with indicators for understanding how much energy the device is consuming while running a software application. In this paper, we explain a procedure for the creation of an energy consumption model of SBCs based on the usage of its components. We apply the procedure on a Raspberry PI 2 model B to test the model with a set of real applications. The results demonstrate the practical feasibility of the approach and show that estimated consumption values on our device have an average error of 2.2%, which is a good approximation without using external and expensive measuring devices.