Energy Efficiency in Edge Computing: Approaches, Challenges & Solutions

Abstract

Edge computing has revolutionized the way we capture, process, and store sensor data in cloud-based hybrid environments. This emerging technology has helped the industry in meeting the ever-demanding computational and data transfer needs of the smart devices being used in domestic and industrial applications. Using Edge computing, the cloud data centres can offload the required data on the edge nodes to reduce the latency in data transfer and processing. These advances have helped the industry and product developers to enable solutions that can provide data, decisions, and control in real-time while making use of local as well as cloud-based data storage and processing. The concept of energy efficiency has been studied, researched, and implemented in various domains, technologies, and applications of computing platforms, but it has not received much attention in the area of edge computing. The edge computing frameworks make use of energy efficiency-focused smart design and implementation solutions at various levels in the form of resource management, workload scheduling, cluster management, VM migration, etc. In this article, we have conducted an extensive literature review of energy-efficient approaches, technologies, challenges, and opportunities that can be used to come up with new innovative approaches and solutions that are leaning towards sustainable energy-based computing and data storage solutions.