Abstract. Future embedded and ubiquitous computing systems will operate
continuously on mobile devices, such as smartphones, with limited processing
capabilities, memory, and power. A critical aspect of developing future
applications for mobile devices will be ensuring that the application provides
sufficient performance while maximizing battery life. Determining how a
software architecture will affect power consumption is hard because the impact
of software design on power consumption is not well understood. Typically,
the power consumption of a mobile software architecture can only be
determined after the architecture is implemented, which is late in the development
cycle when design changes are costly.
Model-driven Engineering (MDE) is a promising solution to this problem. In
an MDE process, a model of the software architecture can be built and analyzed
early in the design cycle to identify key characteristics, such as power consumption.
This paper describes current research in developing an MDE tool for modeling
mobile software architectures and using them to generate synthetic emulation
code to estimate power consumption properties. The paper provides the following
contributions to the study of mobile software development: (1) it shows how
models of a mobile software architecture can be built, (2) it describes how instrumented
emulation code can be generated to run on the target mobile device, and
(3) it discusses how this emulation code can be used to glean important estimates
of software power consumption and performance.