Effective utilization of renewable energy sources in fog computing environment via frequency and modulation level scaling

Fog computing introduces a distributed processing capability close to end users. The proximity of computing to end users leads to lower service time and bandwidth requirements. Energy consumption is a matter of concern in such a system with a large number of computing nodes. Renewable energy sources can be utilized to lessen the burden on the main power grid and reduce the carbon footprint, but due to fluctuations, the effective utilization of renewable energy sources needs proper resource management. In this article, we deal with properly managing the resources in a fog environment where the fog nodes are equipped with onsite renewable energy. This article aims to design an efficient mechanism to dynamically dispatch requests among computing nodes and scale frequency and modulation level, based on the current workload and the availability of renewable energy sources, to minimize the service time while keeping the renewable energy utilization and stability at a satisfactory level. We state the problem as the design of a controller for a system with time-varying nonlinear state equations. Accordingly, we borrow the Lyapunov optimization technique from the control theory to design the request dispatching mechanism and prove its asymptotic optimality. We perform extensive simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the naive time-aware baseline scheme up to 26% and 39%, respectively, in terms of service time and renewable energy utilization.