A System-Level Model for Runtime Power Estimation on Mobile Devices

The growing popularity of mobile internet services, characterized by heavy network transmission, intensive computation and an always-on display, poses a great challenge to the battery lifetime of mobile devices. To manage the power consumption in an efficient way, it is essential to understand how the power is consumed at the system level and to be able to estimate the power consumption during runtime. Although the power modeling of each hardware component has been studied separately, there is no general solution at present of combining them into a system-level power model. In this paper we present a methodology for building a system-level power model without power measurement at the component level. We develop a linear regression model with nonnegative coefficients, which describes the aggregate power consumption of the processors, the wireless network interface and the display. Based on statistics and expert knowledge, we select three hardware performance counters, three network transmission parameters and one display parameter as regression variables. The power estimation, based on our model, exhibits 2.62 percent median error on real mobile internet services.