GreenEdge: Greening Edge Datacenters with Energy-Harvesting IoT Devices

Mobile edge computing, with its promise to fulfill the urgent need for richer applications and better experience of resource-hungry IoT devices, is emerging as a new computing paradigm and has quickly ascended to the spotlight. It is readily acknowledged, however that edge infrastructures are less capable of improving power usage efficiency and integrating renewable energy. To address this challenge, we propose a new framework — GreenEdge, which leverages device-to-device (D2D) communication and energy-harvesting (EH) to realize sustainable and collaborative task execution. Specifically, we first introduce the motivations of combining D2D and EH to green edge infrastructure. We next validate the feasibility and economic-efficiency of combining D2D and EH, with the help of two emerging commercial-applicable IoT applications: smart street lighting and smart bike-sharing. We further present the basic architecture, model and optimization of GreenEdge. For research inspirations, practical challenges and directions towards GreenEdge are identified. Finally, we acknowledge that GreenEdge is not the only road towards sustainability, future alternatives that can work in conjunction with GreenEdge to comprehensively green edge computing are discussed.