Early energy estimation of heterogeneous embedded networks within adaptive systems

This paper presents and evaluates a new approach of modeling energy consumption of communication within adaptive networked embedded systems. The objective is to enable energy estimation within early phases of system development, which allows system designers to compare different allocations of software components. As networked embedded systems consist of multiple specialized networks (with different protocols and topologies) and are characterized by a high degree of interaction, existing network-centric approaches have significant disadvantages describing entire systems. To overcome this problem a model was created which is based on individual communication connections between software components. This enables technology-transparent mapping to network topologies (across borders of networks) which significantly simplifies the evaluation of different software placements.