A Heuristic Spatio-Temporal Scheduling for Virtual Network Allocation Considering Renewable Energy

To achieve carbon neutrality in telecommunications networks, the introduction of renewable energy is expected to further advance in the future. However, renewable energy such as solar power generation can experience large fluctuations in power output depending on weather conditions. Therefore, depending on the location and time period, there may be places where renewable energy cannot be fully consumed and surplus power is generated, and there may be places where renewable energy is not sufficient to meet the power demand. Toward network carbon neutrality, new methods need to be established from a network perspective that avoid inefficient power management problems caused by fluctuations in renewable energy. To solve this problem, we have been studying the control of power consumption locations and time periods by allocating workloads using virtualization technology. In this paper, we propose a workload scheduling method to increase renewable energy use. The problem to maximize the renewable energy use is formulated, and to solve it in a short time, a heuristic search method is proposed. The simulation results show that the proposed control method can increase the amount of renewable energy use while having tradeoffs with communication quality and equipment efficiency.