Exploring the Energy Consumption of Data Sorting Algorithms in Embedded and Mobile Environments

Abstract

Most mobile and embedded devices are battery powered. Hence, their uptime depends on the energy consumption of the used components. Developers made severe effort to optimize hardware components in order to reduce their energy consumption. However, in this paper we show that one also has to consider energy awareness in terms of software. In this study we focus on sorting algorithms, which are not only used directly by the user of a device but also very often implicitly by other algorithms. Our experiments show,that different sorting algorithms consume different amounts of energy. In detail, the experiments show that there is no direct correlation between the time complexity of an algorithm and its energy consumption.