Exploiting Timed Automata for Conformance Testing of Power Measurements

For software development, testing is still the primary choice for investigating the correctness of a system. Automated testing is of utmost importance to support continuous integration and regression tests on actual hardware. For embedded systems, power consumption is a chief performance metric, which is tightly coupled to the hardware used and the software exploiting low power modes. Automated testing of power consumption requires to investigate its conformance to a specification. We employ timed automata for specifying the expected behavior of a real sensor node application, as well as for describing the power measurements obtained from its real-world implementation. Introducing computational optimizations, the presented approach allows to utilize standard model checkers for automated conformance testing of modeled systems and monitored power consumption of their implementations.