Energy characterization of mobile devices and applications using power–thermal benchmarks

Power consumption and heat dissipation are the major factors that limit the performance and mobility of battery-powered devices. As they become key elements in the design of mobile devices and their applications, different power and thermal management strategies have been proposed and implemented during the previous years in order to overcome the mobility limitation due to the battery lifetime. A new energy management approach is to build energy-aware applications so that we have knowledge on the consumed energy while the device is running. In this paper we define two new types of benchmarks, called power and thermal benchmark, which are software applications intended for the run-time system level to provide power and thermal characterization. These benchmarks are an easy way for the applications to adapt their execution pattern, in order to finish their tasks both in time and in the battery lifetime.