nergy-Aware Modelling of Garbage Collectors for New Dynamic Embedded Systems

ded devices. This research has been mainly performed in the JVM. More specifically, it has focused on optimizing the execution time spent in the automatic object reclamation or Garbage Collector (GC) subsystem, which is one of the main sources of overall performance degradation of the system. However, the increasing need for power efficient systems limits very significantly the use of Java for new embedded devices since GCs are usually efficient enough in performance, but very costly in energy and power. Thus, efficient (from the energy viewpoint) automatic Dynamic Memory (DM) reclamation mechanisms and methodologies to define them have to be proposed for a complete integration of Java in the forthcoming low-power embedded systems. In this paper we present a detailed study of the energy consumed in current state-of-the-art GCs, which is the first step to design custom energy-aware GCs for actual dynamic applications (e.g. multimedia) of embedded devices. The remainder of this paper is organized in the following way. In Section 2 we summarize some related work. In Section 3 we describe in detail the experimental setup used to investigate the energy consumption features of state-of-the-art GCs and the representative GCs used in our study. In Section 4, we briefly introduce our case studies and present the experimental results attained. Finally, in Section 5 we draw our conclusions.