Adaptive garbage collection for battery-operated environments

Energy is an important constraint for battery-operated embedded Java environments. In this work, we show how the garbage collector (GC) can be tuned to reduce the energy consumption of Java applications. In particular, we show the importance of tuning the frequency of invoking GC based on object allocation and garbage creation rates to optimize leakage energy consumption. We reduce the leakage energy by exploiting the supply-gated leakage power optimization that is controlled by the GC. In this mechanism, power supply to memory banks that do not hold any useful data can be shut down. We implement a new adaptive GC mechanism within Sun's KVM that optimizes the ability to shut down more banks. An evaluation of our approach using various embedded applications shows that the adaptive garbage collection scheme is effective in reducing the system energy consumption across different hardware configurations.