Throughput-Conscious Energy Allocation and Reliability-Aware Task Assignment for Renewable Powered In-Situ Server Systems

In-situ (InS) server systems are typically deployed in special environments to handle InS workloads which are generated from environmentally sensitive areas or remote places lacking modern power supply infrastructure. This special operating environment of InS servers urges such systems to be powered by renewable energy. In addition, the InS systems are vulnerable to soft errors due to the harsh environments they deploy. This article tackles the problem of allocating harvested energy to renewable powered servers and assigning the InS workloads to these servers for optimizing throughput of both the overall system and individual servers under energy and reliability constraints. We perform the energy allocation based on system state. In particular, for systems in low energy state, we propose a game theoretic approach that models the energy allocation as a cooperative game among multiple servers and derives a Nash bargaining solution. To meet the reliability constraint, we analyze the reliability optimality of assigning tasks to multiple servers and design a reliability-aware task assignment heuristic based on the analysis. Experimental results show that with a small time overhead, the proposed energy allocation approach achieves a high throughput from perspectives of both the overall system and individual servers, and the proposed task assignment approach ensures an increased system reliability.