Demand Response in a Green Multiaccess Edge Computing: An EEH-Enabled Contract System via Hypergraph

Advancements in 5G technology are accelerating the adoption of multiaccess edge computing (MEC), and the widespread deployment of high-density edge devices has introduced significant energy consumption challenges. Edge demand response (EDR) has emerged as an effective solution for improving the sustainability of energy systems while reducing related costs. However, EDR suffers from capacity, proximity, latency, and reputation constraints, which complicate energy consumption in edge systems. To address these issues, this article proposes a novel approach for demand response in green MEC based on a contract system and edge energy harvesting (EEH). A time-varying hypergraph is proposed to formally describe an MEC scenario with time-varying features and multicommunity relationships. Informed by social contract theory, a contract system is developed for MEC based on the time-varying hypergraph. An EEH strategy based on the contract system is proposed to reduce the energy consumption of edge nodes. An edge demand response approach based on the EEH-enabled contract system (EDR-CS) is proposed to minimize edge utility (EU) model issues while preventing deceptions by edge nodes. The experimental results show that the proposed EDR-CS approach outperforms the existing baselines in terms of total completion time (TCT), task failure rate (TFR), overall data rate (ODR) and system energy consumption (SEC).