PNap: Lifecycle-aware Edge Multi-state sleep for Energy Efficient MEC
This work addresses energy efficiency for MEC providers, offering an incremental improvement over existing multi-state sleep mechanisms by integrating service lifecycle management.
The paper tackles the problem of high energy consumption in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) due to idle servers, by introducing PNap, a lifecycle-aware orchestration framework that jointly manages server sleep states and service lifecycle states, resulting in up to 14.9% energy reduction compared to a state-of-the-art solution while maintaining service availability.
Multi-access Edge Computings (MECs) enables low-latency services by executing applications at the network edge. To fulfill low-latency requirements of mobile users, providers have to keep multiple edge servers running at multiple locations, even when, in low-load phases, their capacity is not needed. This significantly increases energy consumption. Multi-state sleep mechanisms mitigate this issue by allowing servers to enter progressively deeper sleep states, trading energy savings for longer wake-up delays. At the same time, service execution depends on non-instantaneous lifecycle operations that cannot be performed while servers are asleep, tightly coupling energy management with service continuity. This paper introduces PowerNap (PNap), a lifecycle-aware orchestration framework that jointly manages server sleep states and service lifecycle states. By leveraging traffic forecasting, PNap jointly minimizes the number of active edge servers and service disruptions. We compare PNap against baselines approaches and a state-of-the-art approach. Results validate PNap, showing how it can reduce energy consumption by up to 14.9% with respect to a state-of-the-art solution while matching its service availability results.