A mobility management using follow-me cloud-cloudlet in fog-computing-based RANs for smart cities

Abstract

Mobility management for supporting the location tracking and location-based service (LBS) is an important issue of smart city by providing the means for the smooth transportation of people and goods. The mobility is useful to contribute the innovation in both public and private transportation infrastructures for smart cities. With the assistance of edge/fog computing, this paper presents a fully new mobility management using the proposed follow-me cloud-cloudlet (FMCL) approach in fog-computing-based radio access networks (Fog-RANs) for smart cities. The proposed follow-me cloud-cloudlet approach is an integration strategy of follow-me cloud (FMC) and follow-me edge (FME) (or called cloudlet). A user equipment (UE) receives the data, transmitted from original cloud, into the original edge cloud before the handover operation. After the handover operation, an UE searches for a new cloud, called as a migrated cloud, and a new edge cloud, called as a migrated edge cloud near to UE, where the remaining data is migrated from the original cloud to the migrated cloud and all the remaining data are received in the new edge cloud. Existing FMC results do not have the property of the VM migration between cloudlets for the purpose of reducing the transmission latency, and existing FME results do not keep the property of the service migration between data centers for reducing the transmission latency. Our proposed FMCL approach can simultaneously keep the VM migration between cloudlets and service migration between data centers to significantly reduce the transmission latency. The new proposed mobility management using FMCL approach aims to reduce the total transmission time if some data packets are pre-scheduled and pre-stored into the cache of cloudlet if UE is switching from the previous Fog-RAN to the serving Fog-RAN. To illustrate the performance achievement, the mathematical analysis and simulation results are examined in terms of the total transmission time, the throughput, the probability of packet loss, and the number of control messages.