Energy efficiency for edge multimedia elastic applications

With the rise of edge computing paradigms, multimedia applications will have to tackle unprecedented management issues, pursuing an optimal balance between performance, Quality of Service (QoS), and power consumption. In this paper, we investigate a novel paradigm to deploy multimedia elastic applications at the edge in a very energy-efficient manner. Our approach is based on pre-provisioning virtual resources that remain "frozen" until the application scales out. Frozen resources are treated in a special way by the infrastructure, leveraging aggressive power-saving mechanisms that keep negligible their impact on energy consumption and performance. We report extensive measurements on QoS and power consumption that we carried out in a real testbed, which is the first working implementation of the proposed paradigm. Our work shows how resource utilization and performance can be increased by leveraging SDN technologies and conscious setting of cloud parameters. We investigate the trade-off between performance and power consumption (i.e., energy efficiency), in relation to different consolidation strategies. Finally, we measure power consumption and estimate energy saving for an elastic video transcoding application deployed at the network edge.