Performance and power estimation for mobile-cloud applications on virtualized platforms

Performance optimization and energy-saving have become major challenges for both hardware designers and software developers of mobile systems due to limited battery capacities. Analysis of the performance and power consumption in such a system and employment of energy-saving techniques as early as possible are keys to competitive products designs. With virtual platforms powered by simulation/emulation engines to help hardware designers in the early design stages for verifying the functional correctness of a hardware design or testing software applications before the hardware is ready, we propose a framework to further support hardware/software co-design with advanced performance and power analysis facilities. Our case studies and experimental results show that our framework can reflect the performance and power behavior of mobile-cloud applications and help hardware/software designers in reducing the energy consumption on these systems. © 2013 IEEE.