IoT Embedded Computing Systems Performance Assessment: a Simple Method
Adriano S. Vale-Cardoso, Mariana Geny Moreira, Carlos H. N. Martins, Michel C. R. Leles · 2019
The advent of Internet of Things - IoT - technology has elevated the embedded solutions employment to level never seen before, both in the problem-solving possibilities as in the complexity of the new systems. SoC-based computers such as those used in embedded systems have been under growing attention due to their low-cost, low-power, reduced footprint and high performance characteristics. These features allow small users as well as industries to design, develop and build wide range of applications with efficiency as the common aspect. A number of platforms that integrate this kind of technology were also proposed by different manufacturers, some employing the open hardware concept. Embedded applications spread over a wide range of fields, which make them hard to characterize in a general sense. For this reason, benchmark suites are often used as a tool for system's performance evaluation. However, such suites consist on a large number of different algorithms, which can spend time and energy to run on SoC computers. In order to contribute to the performance assessment of such systems, this paper presents a simple method for comparing different platforms, based on execution time of simple but representative algorithms: sorting, cross-correlation and discrete-cosine transform calculation for vectors. The power consumption was also considered. Six distinct architectures were used as a case study. Several computer experiments were conducted in order to make possible a statistic characterization of different load conditions in distinct platforms, so their comparison can be done in a meaningful way. Results show that the proposed method provides a good estimation of relative system performance, which can be useful as a criterion choice for selecting different embedded platforms.