Distributed Online Optimization of Edge Computing with Mixed Power Supply of Renewable Energy and Smart Grid

Edge infrastructures, including edge computing servers, are increasingly powered by renewable energy and smart grid combined. Two-way energy trading allows the surplus or shortfall of renewable energy to be traded between a server and the smart grid, but is non-trivial due to randomly varying computation demands and renewables. This paper proposes a new online policy, namely, distributed online resource allocation and load management (DORL), which enables such an edge server and its serving devices to minimize their energy cost and energy consumption, respectively, in a fully distributed manner. The key idea is that we employ the stochastic dual-subgradient method to interpret the battery of the server as a virtual queue. Based on the virtual queue and task queues, the CPU frequencies of the devices and the edge server, the offloading transmit rates of the devices (to the server) and the energy trading decisions of the server (with the smart grid) are decoupled over time and among devices, and optimized on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, we prove that the DORL yields a feasible and asymptotically optimal solution with a cost-backlog tradeoff of [\eta, 1\eta]. Simulations show that the DORL reduces the system cost by nearly 50%, as compared to existing benchmarks.