Research Area:  Fog Computing
In the last years, Internet is evolving towards the cloud-computing paradigm complemented by fog-computing in order to distribute computing, storage, control, networking resources, and services close to end-user devices as much as possible, while sending heavy jobs to the remote cloud. When fog-computing nodes cannot be powered by the main electric grid, some environmental-friendly solutions, such as the use of solaror wind-based generators could be adopted. Their relatively unpredictable power output makes it necessary to include an energy storage system in order to provide power, when a peak of work occurs during periods of low-power generation. An optimized management of such an energy storage system in a green fog-computing node is necessary in order to improve the system performance, allowing the system to cope with high job arrival peaks even during low-power generation periods. In this perspective, this paper adopts reinforcement learning to choose a server activation policy that ensures the minimum job loss probability. A case study is presented to show how the proposed system works, and an extensive performance analysis of a fog-computing node highlights the importance of optimizing battery management according to the size of the Renewable-Energy Generator system and the number of available servers.
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Author(s) Name:  Stefania Conti; Giuseppe Faraci; Rosario Nicolosi; Santi Agatino Rizzo; Giovanni Schembra
Journal name:   IEEE Access
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Publisher name:  IEEE
DOI:  10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2755588
Volume Information:  ( Volume: 5) Page(s): 21126 - 21138
Paper Link:   https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8047939