  In virtualized computing platforms, energy consumption is related to the
computing-plus-communication processes. However, most of the proposed energy
consumption models and energy saving solutions found in literature consider
only the active Virtual Machines (VMs), thus the overall operational energy
expenditure is usually related to solely the computation process. To address
this shortcoming, in this paper we consider a computing-plus-communication
energy model, within the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm, and then
put forward a combination of a traffic engineering- and MEC Location
Service-based online server management algorithm with Energy Harvesting (EH)
capabilities, called Automated Resource Controller for Energy-aware Server
(ARCES), for autoscaling and reconfiguring the computing-plus-communication
resources. The main goal is to minimize the overall energy consumption, under
hard per-task delay constraints (i.e., Quality of Service (QoS)). ARCES jointly
performs (i) a short-term server demand and harvested solar energy forecasting,
(ii) VM soft-scaling, workload and processing rate allocation and lastly, (iii)
switching on/off of transmission drivers (i.e., fast tunable lasers) coupled
with the location-aware traffic scheduling. Our numerical results reveal that
ARCES achieves on average energy savings of 69%, and an energy consumption
ranging from 31%-45%and from 21%-25% at different values of per-VM
reconfiguration cost, with respect to the case where no energy management is
applied.
