Reducing Power Consumption during Server Maintenance on Edge Computing Infrastructures

Edge servers must routinely undergo maintenance to ensure the environment's performance and security. During maintenance, applications hosted by outdated servers must be relocated to alternative servers to avoid downtime. In distributed edges with servers spread across large regions, ensuring that applications are not migrated to servers too far away from their users to avoid high latency hardens the maintenance planning. In addition, the limited power supply of edge sites restricts the list of suitable alternative hosts for the applications even further. Past work has focused on optimizing maintenance or increasing the power efficiency of edge computing infrastructures. However, no work addresses both objectives together. This paper presents Emma, a maintenance strategy that reduces power consumption during edge server maintenance without excessively extending maintenance time or increasing application latency. Experiments show that Emma can minimize power consumption during maintenance by up to 26.48% compared to strategies from the literature.