Design and Evaluation of Single-Board Computer Based Power Monitoring for IoT and Edge Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) and edge platforms are very complex systems. They are heterogeneous in terms of hardware and software. In these systems, being able to document the energy consumed by the nodes is important. To mitigate the impact of such systems on the energy consumption and improve their energy efficiency, research experiments involving power monitoring tools are required. However, in the context of IoT and edge platforms, having access to a power monitoring system to monitor specific nodes can be challenging. Similarly, building a power monitoring tool can be time consuming and complex. Single-Board Computers (SBC) based monitoring systems are flexible since they are accessible and provide full integration with existing computer systems, such as test-beds. However, building and evaluating this type of monitoring tool is challenging. In this paper, we propose a SBC-based power monitoring system that aims at being simple to reproduce and plugable into existing test-beds. In addition, a framework to evaluate the performance of such systems is detailed. The results show that, with this framework, accurate evaluation of the sample read performance of (IC)-C-2-based power meters can be performed. Details about the advantages and weaknesses of our setup are highlighted.