PowerPi: Measuring and modeling the power consumption of the Raspberry Pi

An increasing number of households is connected to the Internet via DSL or cable, for which home gateways are required. The optimization of these - caused by their large number - is a promising area for energy efficiency improvements. Since no power models for home gateways are currently available, the optimization of their power state is not possible. This paper presents PowerPi, a power consumption model for the Raspberry Pi which is used as a substitute to conventional home gateways to derive the impact of typical hardware components on the energy consumption. The different power states of the platform are measured and a power model is derived, allowing to estimate the power consumption based on CPU and network utilization only. The proposed power model estimates the power consumption resulting in a RMSE of less than 3.3%, which is slightly larger than the maximum error of the measurements of 2.5%.