CarbonEdge: Leveraging Mesoscale Spatial Carbon-Intensity Variations for Low Carbon Edge Computing

TL;DR

This paper introduces CarbonEdge, a framework that exploits mesoscale spatial variations in carbon intensity to optimize workload placement in edge computing, significantly reducing emissions while maintaining low latency.

Contribution

It reveals that fine-grained carbon intensity variations exist at mesoscale levels and develops a framework to leverage these variations for low-carbon edge computing.

Findings

CarbonEdge reduces emissions by up to 78.7% in regional deployments.

Potential savings of 49.5% in the US and 67.8% in Europe with minimal latency impact.

Significant spatial variations in carbon intensity are observable at mesoscale levels.

Abstract

The proliferation of latency-critical and compute-intensive edge applications is driving increases in computing demand and carbon emissions at the edge. To better understand carbon emissions at the edge, we analyze granular carbon intensity traces at intermediate "mesoscales," such as within a single US state or among neighboring countries in Europe, and observe significant variations in carbon intensity at these spatial scales. Importantly, our analysis shows that carbon intensity variations, which are known to occur at large continental scales (e.g., cloud regions), also occur at much finer spatial scales, making it feasible to exploit geographic workload shifting in the edge computing context. Motivated by these findings, we propose \proposedsystem, a carbon-aware framework for edge computing that optimizes the placement of edge workloads across mesoscale edge data centers to reduce carbon emissions while meeting latency SLOs. We implement CarbonEdge and evaluate it on a real edge computing testbed and through large-scale simulations for multiple edge workloads and settings. Our experimental results on a real testbed demonstrate that CarbonEdge can reduce emissions by up to 78.7\% for a regional edge deployment in central Europe. Moreover, our CDN-scale experiments show potential savings of 49.5\% and 67.8\% in the US and Europe, respectively, while limiting the one-way latency increase to less than 5.5 ms.