Paper Info
Title
The Impact of Virtual Machines on Embedded Systems
Abstract
Embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex and, due to their tight energy requirements, all the available resources must be used in the best possible way. However, Android, the most used software platform for embedded systems, features a virtual machine to run applications. Even though it ensures flexibility so the application can execute on different underlying architectures without the need for recompilation, it burdens the system because of the introduction of an extra software layer. Considering this scenario, through the development of an extension of the Android QEMU emulator and a specific benchmark set, this work evaluates the significance of the virtual machine by comparing applications written in Java and in native language. We show that, given a fixed energy budget, a different amount of applications can be executed depending the way they were implemented. We also demonstrate that this difference varies according to the processor, by executing the applications on all officially supported Android architectures (Intel x86, ARM, and MIPS). Therefore, even though the Virtual Machine provides total transparency to the software developer, he/she must be aware of it and the underlying target micro architecture at early designs stages so as to build a low-energy application.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/COMPSAC.2015.90
COMPSAC '15 Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 39th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference - Volume 02
Keywords
Field
DocType
Java,embedded systems,mobile computing,smart phones,software architecture,virtual machines,Android QEMU emulator,Java,VM,embedded system,software architecture,virtual machine,Android,Dalvik,JNI,Virtual machine
x86,Embedded Java,Android (operating system),Virtual machine,Computer science,Real-time computing,Software,Cross-platform,Java,Operating system,Microarchitecture,Embedded system
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
2
0730-3157
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
11
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anderson Luiz Sartor1317.67
Arthur Francisco Lorenzon211.09
Antonio Carlos Schneider Beck321.71