  Edge computing brings several advantages, such as reduced latency, increased
bandwidth, and improved locality of traffic. One aspect that is not
sufficiently understood is to what extent the different communication latency
experienced in the edge-cloud continuum impacts on the energy consumption of
clients. We studied the energy consumption of a request-response communication
scheme when an LTE node communicates with edge-based or cloud-based servers.
Results show that the reduced latency of edge servers bring significant
benefits in terms of energy consumption. Experiments also show how the energy
savings brought by edge computing are influenced by the prevalent direction of
data transfer (upload vs download), load of the server, and daytime/nighttime
operation.
