Edge-to-Cloud Computations-as-a-Service in Software-Defined Energy Networks for Smart Grids

Abstract

Modern power grids face an acute mismatch between where data is generated and where it can be processed: protection relays, EV (Electric Vehicle) charging, and distributed renewables demand millisecond analytics at the edge, while energy-hungry workloads often sit in distant clouds leading to missed real-time deadlines and wasted power. We address this by proposing, to our knowledge, the first-ever SDEN (Software Defined Energy Network) for CaaS (Computations-as-a-Service) that unifies edge, fog, and cloud compute with 5G URLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications), SDN (Software Defined Networking), and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) to co-optimize energy, latency, and reliability end-to-end. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a joint task offloading formulation that couples computation placement with network capacity under explicit URLLC constraints; (ii) a feasibility preserving, lightweight greedy heuristic that scales while closely tracking optimal energy and latency trade-offs; and (iii) a tiered AI (Artificial Intelligence) pipeline-reactive at the edge, predictive in the fog, strategic in the cloud-featuring privacy-preserving, federated GNNs (Graph Neural Networks) for fault detection and microgrid coordination. Unlike prior edge-only or cloud-only schemes, SDEN turns fragmented grid compute into a single, programmable substrate that delivers dependable, energy-aware, real time analytics establishing a first-ever, software defined path to practical, grid-scale CaaS.