Energy Efficiency Measurements of Mobile Virtualization Systems

The energy efficiency has become an important aspect in data centers and large server systems, including the ones used in infrastructure for mobile applications service providers. Virtualization is one of the main research directions for both large scale data centers and applications servers. Furthermore, virtualization is also popular on desktop systems and is now considered in embedded systems. The next step will be to use virtualization on battery powered systems or mobile devices, where power consumption is an important aspect. This paper explores how virtualization influences the power consumption of both physical systems and virtual systems and which is the most efficient way to implement virtualized applications. The paper proposes a test bench and a set of test cases which can be further used to evaluate and compare different virtualization solutions together with several power management mechanisms using specific energy efficiency metrics.