Evaluation of Strategies for the Development of Efficient Code for Raspberry Pi Devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is faced with challenges that require green solutions and energy-efficient paradigms. Architectures (such as ARM) have evolved significantly in recent years, with improvements to processor efficiency, essential for always-on devices, as a focal point. However, as far as software is concerned, few approaches analyse the advantages of writing efficient code when programming IoT devices. Therefore, this proposal aims to improve source code optimization to achieve better execution times. In addition, the importance of various techniques for writing efficient code for Raspberry Pi devices is analysed, with the objective of increasing execution speed. A complete set of tests have been developed exclusively for analysing and measuring the improvements achieved when applying each of these techniques. This will raise awareness of the significant impact the recommended techniques can have.

Analysis of Energy Consumption and Optimization Techniques for Writing Energy-Efficient Code

“…Compilers often offer different levels of optimization that help reduce code size, improve memory utilization, speed up executions or optimize the number of input/output operations. However, as demonstrated in [11] and in this research, if programmers apply several specific techniques manually they can achieve better performances, not only regarding execution time but also in energy consumption, with minimal effort by modifying the code. Therefore, the proposed techniques are suitable for both expert programmers and beginners in IoT programming.…”

“…The main objective of the current approach is to demonstrate that the optimization techniques covered in [11] achieve not only significant reductions in execution times, but also meaningful gains in terms of energy saving. These improvements become especially important when they are applied to the code of programs that run uninterrupted throughout the year, something very common in IoT devices.…”

“…In [11] we provided a detailed review of the existing literature, specially focused on improving source code optimization to achieve better execution times. The lack of proposals dedicated to writing efficient code for IoT devices was especially noteworthy.…”

“…In our previous work [11], we presented the analysis of a broad set of techniques for the efficient writing of programming code in RPi devices, all of them focused on reducing execution time without modifying neither the semantic of the program nor its results. The current research aims to analyze the energy saving that can be achieved when using each of these techniques, with the objective of demonstrating their effectiveness when writing energy-efficient code and confirming that, in this case, the automatic help offered by the compiler is also insufficient in terms of energy saving.…”

Performance evaluation of list iteration methods in Java: an empirical study

“…Thus, only the time required to iterate over list items has been considered. • Every test scenario has been repeated 50 times and measurements have been averaged to ensure accuracy via balancing variations in the run time (12) .…”