Hybrid Energy-Aware Ranking and Optimization

The increase in delay-sensitive application tasks requires heterogeneous edge clusters to maintain low online latency and energy efficiency without relying on rigid scheduling policies. To address this, we propose HERO (Hybrid Energy-aware Ranking and Optimization), a lightweight collaborative scheduling framework. HERO utilizes a perturbation-based communication-aware multi-layer perceptron (MLP) predictor to quantify global time sensitivity and discover latent time slack in non-critical paths. A hybrid budget mechanism then converts this slack into customized DVFS decisions. These decisions are based on the inherent computational load and topological criticality to optimize energy consumption. A communication-aware hole-filling strategy dynamically recovers sporadic idle times fragmented by heterogeneous communication overhead. Extensive simulations were conducted across varying DAG depths, parallelism levels, and system utilizations. Compared to state-of-the-art algorithms (NSGA-II, SSA, TOM, and DPMC), HERO reduced the completion time by an average of 10.89% under high-density topologies, and achieved up to 4.04% energy savings across varying task depths.