Migration decision for hybrid mobility in reconfigurable distributed virtual machines

Stochastic modeling and analysis of hybrid mobility in reconfigurable distributed virtual machines

Joint edge caching and dynamic service migration in SDN based mobile edge computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) provides a promising approach to significantly reduce network operational cost and improve quality of service (QoS) of mobile users by pushing computation resources to the network edges, and enables a scalable Internet of Things (IoT) architecture for time-sensitive applications (e-healthcare, real-time monitoring, and so on.). However, the mobility of mobile users and the limited coverage of edge servers can result in significant network performance degradation, dramatic drop in QoS, and even interruption of ongoing edge services; therefore, it is difficult to ensure service continuity. Service migration has great potential to address the issues, which decides when or where these services are migrated following user mobility and the changes of demand. In this paper, two conceptions similar to service migration, i.e., live migration for data centers and handover in cellular networks, are first discussed. Next, the cutting-edge research efforts on service migration in MEC are reviewed, and a devisal of taxonomy based on various research directions for efficient service migration is presented. Subsequently, a summary of three technologies for hosting services on edge servers, i.e., virtual machine, container, and agent, is provided. At last, open research challenges in service migration are identified and discussed.

In this paper, we study the problem of dynamically migrating a service in Clouds to satisfy a sequence of mobile batch-request demands in a cost effective way. The service may have a single or multiple replicas, each running on a virtual machine. As the origins of the mobile accesses are frequently changed over time, this problem is particularly important to those time-bounded services to achieve enhanced QoS and cost effectiveness. Moving services closer to client locations not only reduces the service access latency but also minimizes the network cost for service providers. However, these benefits do not come without compromise. The migration comes at cost of bulk data transfer and service disruption, as a result, increasing the overall service costs. To gain the benefits of service migration while minimizing the increased monetary costs, we propose a search-based dynamic migration algorithm that can effectively migrate a single or multiple servers to adapt to the changes of access patterns with minimum service costs. The algorithm is characterized by effective uses of historical access information to conduct virtual moves of a set of servers as a whole under a certain condition so as to overcome the limitations of local search in cost reduction. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively achieve the goal by satisfying service request sequences. Moreover, with moderate migration cost, using a single server is more cost-effective to satisfy the requests in Clouds than deploying multiple servers.

In order to realize green society, we take the process migration approach to reducing the total electric energy consumption of clusters by migrating virtual machines. In our previous studies, the DM (Dynamic Migration) algorithm is proposed where virtual machines are dynamically resumed and suspended and a group of virtual machines on a host server migrate to a guest server so that the total energy consumption of the host and guest servers can be reduced. In this paper, we newly propose a DGM (Dynamic Group Migration) algorithm. Here, there is a seed virtual machine on each server. A virtual machine is created as a clone of the seed virtual machine so that the number of processes on each virtual machine is kept fewer. In the evaluation, we show the total electric energy consumption of servers can be more reduced in the DGM algorithm compared with other algorithms.

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm to support high-quality time-sensitive applications. In this paper, we investigate the service migration (i.e., whether, when, and where to migrate the services) to seamlessly serve mobile users in small-cell MEC systems. The service migration is formulated as an optimization problem to minimize the long-term system average delay that consists of queuing, communication, and migration delays. Considering the dynamic user mobility and network conditions, the formulated problem is non-convex and difficult to solve in real time. To this end, we propose a Mobility-aware Service Migration scheme, named MSM, to make real-time decisions on service migrations by utilizing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches. Specifically, we first design a user classification mechanism based on users’ mobility patterns to reduce the complexity of decision-making. We then formulate the service migration as a Markov decision process and devise an RL-based framework to make service migration decisions in real time in the dynamic MEC environment. Extensive data-driven experiments demonstrate the efficacy of MSM in reducing the system average delay.

Service migration with edge collaboration: Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning approach combined with user preference adaptation

We study the problem of virtual machine (VM) placement and migration in a data center. In the current approaches, VMs are assigned to physical servers using on-demand provisioning. Such an approach is simple but it often results in a poor performance due to resource fragmentation. Additionally, sub-optimal VM placement usually generates unneeded VM migration and unnecessary cross network traffic. The efficiency of a datacenter therefore significantly depends on how VMs are provisioned and where they are placed. A good placement scheme will not only improve the quality of service but also reduce the operation cost of the data center. In this paper, we study the problem of optimal VM placement and migration to minimize resource usage and power consumption in a data center. We formulate the optimization problem as a joint multiple objective function and solve it by leveraging the framework of convex optimization. Due to the intractable nature of the combinatorial optimization, we then propose Multi-level Join VM Placement and Migration (MJPM) algorithms based on the relaxed convex optimization framework to approximate the optimal solution. The theoretical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms that substantially increases data center efficiency. In addition, our extensive simulation results on different practical topologies show significant performance improvement over the existing approaches.

We describe our vision, goals and plans for HARNESS, a distributed, reconfigurable and heterogeneous computing environment that supports dynamically adaptable parallel applications. HARNESS builds on the core concept of the personal virtual machine as an abstraction for distributed parallel programming, but fundamentally extends this idea, greatly enhancing dynamic capabilities. HARNESS is being designed to embrace dynamics at every level through a pluggable model that allows multiple distributed virtual machines (DVMs) to merge, split and interact with each other. It provides mechanisms for new and legacy applications to collaborate with each other using the HARNESS infrastructure, and defines and implements new plug-in interfaces and modules so that applications can dynamically customize their virtual environment. HARNESS fits well within the larger picture of computational grids as a dynamic mechanism to hide the heterogeneity and complexity of the nationally distributed infrastructure. HARNESS DVMs allow programmers and users to construct personal subsets of an existing computational grid and treat them as unified network computers, providing a familiar and comfortable environment that provides easy-to-understand scoping.

ABSTRACTLive virtual machine (LVM) migration is pivotal in cloud computing for its ability to seamlessly transfer virtual machines (VMs) between physical hosts, optimise resource utilisation, and enable uninterrupted service. However, concerns persist regarding safeguarding sensitive data during migration, particularly in critical sectors like healthcare, banking and military operations. Existing migration methods often compromise between performance and data security, prompting the need for a balanced solution. To address this, we propose a novel framework merging machine learning with selective encryption to fortify the pre‐copy live migration process. Our approach intelligently predicts optimal migration times while selectively encrypting sensitive data, ensuring confidentiality and integrity without compromising performance. Rigorous experiments demonstrate its effectiveness, showcasing an average 51.82% reduction in downtime and an average 72.73% decrease in total migration time across diverse workloads. This integration of selective encryption not only bolsters security but also optimises migration metrics, presenting a robust solution for uninterrupted service delivery in critical cloud computing domains.

The advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), which streams a wide range of computation-intensive applications with strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, has caused a paradigm shift from cloud computing to edge computing. Edge computing can drastically reduce latency and improve QoS. However, various dynamic changes can affect service continuity, thus requiring service migration. The dynamic computation load is one of the changes that are typically overlooked in service migration. In this paper, we propose the Dynamic Load-based Proactive Migration (DLPM) scheme. DLPM adopts a finite-state machine (FSM) that models the dynamic computation load, and proactively migrates computation tasks based on the associated transition probabilities. We formulate the service migration problem as an integer linear programming (ILP) optimization problem that aims to minimize the delay. We provide an analytical solution to the optimization problem using the KKT conditions and Lagrangian analysis. Performance evaluation shows that DLPM yields significant improvements in terms of delay and number of migrations compared to the reactive migration approach.

In this paper, we present AnomalyDetect, an approach for detecting anomalies in cloud services. A cloud service consists of a set of interacting applications/processes running on one or more interconnected virtual machines. AnomalyDetect uses the Kalman Filter as the basis for predicting the states of virtual machines running cloud services. It uses the cloud service's virtual machine historical data to forecast potential anomalies. AnomalyDetect has been integrated with the AutoMigrate framework and serves as the means for detecting anomalies to automatically trigger live migration of cloud services to preserve their availability. AutoMigrate is a framework for developing intelligent systems that can monitor and migrate cloud services to maximize their availability in case of cloud disruption. We conducted a number of experiments to analyze the performance of the proposed AnomalyDetect approach. The experimental results highlight the feasibility of AnomalyDetect as an approach to autonomic cloud availability.

Live migration of virtual machine (VM) is a promising technology that helps physical machines (PMs) adapt to load changes and guarantees Quality of Service (QoS) in cloud data center. Many individual-based VM migration studies ignore the association between VMs, resulting in high communication cost. Some research on multiple VMs migration migrates the VM group as a whole, which is likely to result in ineffective migration and increase the network burden. In this paper, a VM migration algorithm based on group selection (VMMAGS) is proposed, which takes into account the migration cost, communication cost, and VM heat to optimize migration performance. The appropriate VM groups are selected as migration options, and the optimal migration scheme is obtained according to the integration cost of partitions of selected VM groups. Extensive experiments show that our algorithm can effectively reduce the migration cost and communication cost, improve the system reliability compared with other related algorithms.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a key enabler for ultra-low latency in heterogeneous dense cellular networks in the 5G era and beyond, by deploying services at the network edge. Due to high user mobility, the services are usually migrated to follow the users by predicting the user trajectory to achieve a balance between energy consumption and service latency. However, service migration for multi-user heterogeneous dense cellular networks is challenging because (1) the user trajectory prediction, which is crucial for service migration, becomes intractable with a large number of users, and (2) making service migration decisions for each user independently is subjected to interference among the users. Therefore, in this study, we formulated the service migration of all the users in MEC-enabled heterogeneous dense cellular networks as an optimization problem, with the objective of minimizing the average energy consumption while satisfying the service latency requirements, taking into account the interference among different users. Next, we developed an efficient energy-efficient online algorithm based on the Lyapunov and particle swarm optimizations, called EGO, to resolve the original problem without predicting the trajectories of the users. Finally, a series of simulations based on real-world mobility traces of vehicles in Bologna were conducted to establish the superiority of the EGO algorithm over state-of-the-art solutions.

Recently, virtualization has been widely adopted in embedded systems. Because most of embedded systems have real-time requirements, real-time property needs to be preserved in a virtual machine system. We present how we can deal with real-time issues in an embedded virtual machine. Our contribution is that we provide a new abstract periodic interface to a real-time virtual machine so that the virtual machine can meet the physical execution condition.