Energy-Efficient Resource Provisioning Strategy for Reduced Power Consumption in Edge Computing

• Main Authors: Juan Fang, Yong Chen, Shuaibing Lu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-09-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: edge computing; energy-saving; task scheduling; sleep mode
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/17/6057

Edge computing is an emerging paradigm that settles some servers on the near-user side and allows some real-time requests from users to be directly returned to the user after being processed by these servers settled on the near-user side. In this paper, we focus on saving the energy of the system to provide an efficient scheduling strategy in edge computing. Our objective is to reduce the power consumption for the providers of the edge nodes while meeting the resources and delay constraints. We propose a two-stage scheduling strategy which includes the scheduling and resource provisioning. In the scheduling stage, we first propose an efficient scheme based on the branch and bound method. In order to reduce complexity, we propose a heuristic algorithm that guarantees users’ deadlines. In the resource provisioning stage, we first approach the problem by virtualizing the edge nodes into master and slave nodes based on the sleep power consumption mode. After that, we propose a scheduling strategy through balancing the resources of virtual nodes that reduce the power consumption and guarantees the user’s delay as well. We use iFogSim to simulate our strategy. The simulation results show that our strategy can effectively reduce the power consumption of the edge system. In the test of idle tasks, the highest energy consumption was 27.9% lower than the original algorithm.