Organizations: Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, George Washington University, USA · Department of Computer Science, Information, and Engineering Technology, Youngstown State University, USA
Deep learning applications at the network edge lead to a significant growth in AI-related carbon emissions, presenting a critical sustainability challenge. The existing edge computing frameworks optimize for latency and throughput, but they largely ignore the environmental impact of inference workloads. This paper introduces CarbonEdge, a carbon-aware deep learning inference framework that extends adaptive model partitioning with carbon footprint estimation and green scheduling apabilities. We propose a carbon-aware scheduling algorithm that extends traditional weighted scoring with a carbon efficiency metric, supporting a tunable performance--carbon trade-off (demonstrated via weight sweep). Experimental evaluations on Docker-simulated heterogeneous edge environments show that CarbonEdge-Green mode achieves a 22.9% reduction in carbon emissions compared to monolithic execution. The framework achieves 1.3x improvement in carbon efficiency (245.8 vs 189.5 inferences per gram CO2) with negligible scheduling overhead (0.03ms per task). These results highlight the framework's potential for sustainable edge AI deployment, providing researchers and practitioners a tool to quantify and minimize the environmental footprint of distributed deep learning inference.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: CarbonEdge system architecture showing the integration of carbon monitoring with adaptive scheduling.
Mode
wR
wL
wP
wB
wC
Performance
0.25
0.25
0.30
0.15
0.05
Green
0.15
0.15
0.10
0.10
0.50
Balanced
0.20
0.20
0.15
0.15
0.30
TABLE I: Weight configurations for scheduling modes
Edge inference runs trained AI models on nearby devices such as phones, cameras, robots, and embedded computers under tight resource and latency limits.
As edge AI deployments scale to billions of devices running always-on, real-time compound AI pipelines, they represent a massive and largely unmanaged source of energy consumption and carbon emissions. To reduce carbon emissions while maximizing Quality-of-Service (QoS), this paper proposes FM-CAC, a proactive carbon-aware control framework that leverages a battery as an active temporal buffer. By decoupling energy acquisition from energy consumption, FM-CAC can maximize the use of low-carbon energy, substantially reducing carbon emissions. At each control step, FM-CAC jointly optimizes the software pipeline variant, the hardware operating point, and the battery charging and discharging actions. To support this decision process, FM-CAC leverages edge-friendly Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) for zero-shot carbon forecasting and integrates these forecasts into a dynamic programming solver with deferred cost attribution to prevent myopic battery depletion. Results show that FM-CAC reduces carbon emissions by up to 65.6% while maintaining near-maximum inference accuracy.
Kang Yang, Walid A. Hanafy, Prashant Shenoy +1
University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, USA · University of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst, USA
Large Language Models (LLMs) with function-calling capabilities are becoming critical for modern agentic AI systems. Nevertheless, current deployments typically route inferences to powerful cloud-based models, incurring significant energy use and carbon emissions. We address this sustainability challenge with a carbon-aware routing framework that distributes function-calling queries across a three-tier edge-cloud architecture, combining edge and cloud LLMs on heterogeneous hardware. At its core, a lightweight k-NN predictor operating in a unified semantic-lexical embedding space estimates query-specific accuracy, delay, and power consumption on each edge tier. These predictions are then combined with real-time grid carbon intensity to route every query to the lowest-emission tier capable of executing it successfully. Evaluated on state-of-the-art function-calling benchmarks and LLM families, our framework matches cloud-level accuracy while reducing operational carbon emissions by 4× on average.
Aikaterini Maria Panteleaki, Varatheepan Paramanayakam, Spyros Tragoudas +1
School of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have become powerful tools for supporting and automating complex human tasks. Despite their benefits, growing attention has been directed toward their environmental implications, primarily due to their high energy demands and associated carbon emissions. This concern is particularly relevant in light of the increasing deployment of large-scale models, especially Deep Learning (DL) architectures, which provide advanced predictive capabilities but require substantial computational resources. This paper presents a systematic review of research on Green AI, Green DL, and optimization techniques aimed at reducing the environmental impact of AI models. In addition, we examine and compare several carbon measurement tools for estimating emissions generated by AI algorithms. To complement the review, we conducted an empirical evaluation using a CPU-based experimental setup, in which six DL models were implemented for a multi-label classification task. The objective was to quantify and compare their overall carbon emissions and to determine which stages of the DL lifecycle contribute most significantly to the total footprint. The results show that the training phase is the primary source of emissions. Moreover, the findings reveal that increased architectural complexity does not systematically translate into proportional accuracy gains, highlighting the importance of carefully balancing predictive performance and environmental cost. These results reinforce the need to integrate sustainability considerations into model selection and AI system design.
Samar Garrab, Sarra Boughriou, Manel BenSassi
Royal Military College of Canada, Ontario, Canada. · Concordia University, Quebec, Canada. · ´Ecole Nationale des Sciences de l’Informatique, Tunisia.