LwHBench: A low-level hardware component benchmark and dataset for Single Board Computers

Abstract

In today's computing environment, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data processing are moving toward the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Edge computing paradigm, benchmarking resource-constrained devices is a critical task to evaluate their suitability and performance. The literature has extensively explored the performance of IoT devices when running high-level benchmarks specialized in particular application scenarios, such as AI or medical applications. However, lower-level benchmarking applications and datasets that analyze the hardware components of each device are needed. This low-level device understanding enables new AI solutions for network, system and service management based on device performance, such as individual device identification, so it is an area worth exploring more in detail. In this paper, we present LwHBench, a low-level hardware benchmarking application for Single-Board Computers that measures the performance of CPU, GPU, Memory and Storage taking into account the component constraints in these types of devices. LwHBench has been implemented for Raspberry Pi devices and run for 100 days on a set of 45 devices to generate an extensive dataset that allows the usage of AI techniques in different application scenarios. Finally, to demonstrate the inter-scenario capability of the created dataset, a series of AI-enabled use cases about device identification and context impact on performance are presented as examples and exploration of the published data