Source code optimizations for low power consumption on microprocessor-based systems

Power consumption is an important constraint in the design of battery-operated embedded systems. Minimizing power dissipation may be handled in terms of hardware or software optimizations. Source code-level optimization techniques have been used as an alternative to achieve low power consumption when programming embedded systems, however these techniques should be analyzed with statistical sound methods in order to reach strong conclusions about their actual impact on the power consumption. In this work, source code optimizations are applied on a set of representative benchmarks for embedded processors (MiBench), to analyze whether the techniques have or not an effect on the power dissipation of a set of microprocessor-based platforms. Design of experiments techniques (DOE) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) are used to achieve statistical sound conclusions. Results showed that not all optimizations have an effect on power consumption, moreover some techniques depend on the target platform where they are run.