Online user distribution-aware virtual machine re-deployment and live migration in SDN-based data centers

Abstract

Virtual machine (VM) re-deployment and migration has been proven to be a key technique for cloud data centers to implement resource optimization and load balance. Also, live VM migration aims to guarantee the continuity of the existing data flows. Though VM management has been well studied, it has so far mostly focused on optimizing resource utilization, while the important issue of users' quality of experience has been ignored. In mobile cloud computing, user distribution changes dynamically over time and it can significantly affect both the service latency and network resource utilization. In the traditional network, VM migration may cause a flash crowd of flow changing and a long service downtime due to VM's IP address changing. Software-defined networking is an emerging paradigm to logically centralize the network control plane and automate the configuration of individual network elements, which can be ubiquitously deployed in data centers and serve as an effective means for flow handling. In this paper, we design a user distribution-aware virtual machine re-deployment mechanism and propose a traffic-redirection virtual machine migration scheme to keep the active flows from being interrupted. We further provide simulations to show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approaches over existing schemes.