Meta-analytical comparison of energy consumed by two sorting algorithms

Mobile devices performance and uptime heavily depend on energy consumed at the hardware and software level. Hence implementation of efficient algorithms has become a crucial aspect for increasing the performance of such systems and battery life for mobile devices. Sorting algorithms are implicitly the building block of many program implementation. Over the past years, researchers have spent more time optimizing hardware components to reduce their energy consumption. However, it has not been so clear which sorting algorithm is more energy efficient. In this study, we conduct a meta-analytical comparison of the energy consumed by the two most common sorting algorithms namely quick sort and merge sort. Our study mainly focused on energy consumption for mobile devices and embedded systems. For our meta-analysis and literature review, we took into consideration studies published not more than 20 years ago. The meta-analytical results show that there is no significant difference between both algorithms in terms of energy efficiency.