Carbon-Aware Replication Scheduling Under Recovery-Point Constraints: A Trace-Driven Multiobjective Evaluation
Abstract
Replication schedules can shift flexible data-transfer activity toward periods of lower grid carbon intensity, but delaying replication may increase recovery-point exposure. We evaluated a carbon-aware scheduling policy using 12 months of regional electricity-intensity data and 64 enterprise workload traces. A multiobjective controller selected replication windows subject to explicit recovery-point limits and available network capacity. Compared with immediate replication, carbon-aware scheduling reduced estimated electricity-related emissions by 18.6% while maintaining the required recovery point in 97.4% of intervals. Emission reductions were largest for workloads with moderate change rates and recovery-point objectives above 30 minutes. Tight five-minute objectives left little temporal flexibility and produced minimal carbon benefit. A cost-only scheduler achieved similar transfer timing in some regions but diverged when electricity price and carbon intensity were weakly correlated. Sensitivity analysis showed that forecast errors in grid intensity had limited effect unless low-carbon windows were short. Carbon-aware replication can therefore reduce environmental impact without materially weakening resilience when operational constraints are encoded as hard limits rather than secondary preferences.
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