Analyzing Per-Application Energy Consumption in a Multi-Application Computing Continuum

In today’s digital society, diverse computing de-vices-from edge devices to data centers-support various applications, each with specific performance and energy characteristics. Analyzing application energy consumption is crucial for improving energy efficiency, optimizing resources, and reducing environmental impact. However, while comprehensive energy measurements are feasible for specific configurations, they are impractical for assessing diverse application mappings. Still, stakeholders such as cloud providers, developers, users, and researchers need insights into application-level energy behavior for informed decision-making. In this work, we propose a fine-grained simulation approach for analyzing application energy behavior in edge/cloud environments. We implemented our approach as an enhanced version of the iFogSim framework. We demonstrate its effectiveness by evaluating different multi-application scenarios and configurations for a video surveillance application. Our approach facilitates the fast evaluation of different scenarios and deployment strategies, providing insights that can contribute to more energy-efficient edge/cloud computing systems and digital services.