On Enabling Sustainable Edge Computing with Renewable Energy Resources

TLDR

Edge computing extends compute and storage to the network edge to reduce latency for time‑constrained IoT applications, but its growing deployment has raised significant energy demands that threaten sustainable urban systems. The authors propose a unified energy‑management framework to enable sustainable edge computing using distributed renewable energy resources. The framework coordinates energy supply and edge computing to fully exploit renewable resources, and a prototype microgrid‑edge computing system using solar‑wind hybrid power was implemented to evaluate it. Experiments show that with the framework, renewable energy reliably powered edge devices for 94.8 % of the test period.

Abstract

The emergent paradigm of edge computing advocates that computational and storage resources can be extended to the edge of the network so that the impact of data transmission latency over the Internet can be effectively reduced for time-constrained Internet of Things applications. With the widespread deployment of edge computing devices, the energy demand of these devices has increased and started to become a noticeable issue for the suitable development of urban systems. In this article, we propose a unified energy management framework for enabling a sustainable edge computing paradigm with distributed renewable energy resources. This framework supports cooperation between the energy supply system and the edge computing system so that renewable energy can be fully utilized while offering improved quality of service for time-constrained IoT applications. A prototype system is also implemented by using microgrid (solar-wind hybrid energy system) and edge computing devices together. The experiment results demonstrate that renewable energy is fully capable of supporting the reliable running of edge computing devices in the prototype system during most (94.8 percent) of the experimental period when our proposed framework was employed.