Exploiting Timed Automata for Conformance Testing of Power Measurements

Abstract

For software development, testing is still the primary choice for investigating the correctness of a system. Automated testing is of utmost importance to support continuous integration and regression tests on actual hardware. For embedded systems, power consumption is a chief performance metric, which is tightly coupled to the hardware used and the software exploiting low power modes. Automated testing of power consumption requires to investigate its conformance to a specification. We employ timed automata for specifying the expected behavior of a real sensor node application, as well as for describing the power measurements obtained from its real-world implementation. Introducing computational optimizations, the presented approach allows to utilize standard model checkers for automated conformance testing of modeled systems and monitored power consumption of their implementations.

We would like to thank Marius Mikucionis and Kim Larsen for their support on Uppaal and Simon Perathoner for interesting discussions. The work presented here was supported by the National Competence Center in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS), a center supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant number 5005-67322.