Profiling and Improving the Duty-Cycling Performance of Linux-based IoT Devices

Abstract: Minimizing the energy consumption of Linux-based devices is an essential step towards their wide deployment in various IoT scenarios. Energy saving methods such as duty-cycling aim to address this constraint by limiting the amount of time the device is powered on. In this work we study and improve the amount of time a Linux-based IoT device is powered on to accomplish its tasks. We analyze the processes of system boot up and shutdown on two platforms, the Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless, and enhance duty-cycling performance by identifying and disabling time-consuming or unnecessary units initialized in the userspace. We also study whether SD card speed and SD card capacity utilization affect boot up duration and energy consumption. In addition, we propose 'Pallex', a parallel execution framework built on top of the 'systemd init' system to run a user application concurrently with userspace initialization. We validate the performance impact of Pallex when applied to various IoT application scenarios: (i) capturing an image, (ii) capturing and encrypting an image, (iii) capturing and classifying an image using the the k-nearest neighbor algorithm, and (iv) capturing images and sending them to a cloud server. Our results show that system lifetime is increased by 18.3%, 16.8%, 13.9% and 30.2%, for these application scenarios, respectively.