Mobility-Induced Service Migration in Mobile Micro-Clouds

TL;DR

This paper studies service migration in mobile micro-clouds, modeling the problem as an MDP and deriving an optimal threshold policy for efficient service migration based on user mobility.

Contribution

It formulates the migration problem as an MDP and derives an analytical solution for the optimal threshold policy under a specific mobility model.

Findings

Optimal threshold policy for service migration identified

Analytical solutions for migration costs derived

Proposed algorithm outperforms standard MDP solutions

Abstract

Mobile micro-cloud is an emerging technology in distributed computing, which is aimed at providing seamless computing/data access to the edge of the network when a centralized service may suffer from poor connectivity and long latency. Different from the traditional cloud, a mobile micro-cloud is smaller and deployed closer to users, typically attached to a cellular basestation or wireless network access point. Due to the relatively small coverage area of each basestation or access point, when a user moves across areas covered by different basestations or access points which are attached to different micro-clouds, issues of service performance and service migration become important. In this paper, we consider such migration issues. We model the general problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), and show that, in the special case where the mobile user follows a one-dimensional asymmetric random walk mobility model, the optimal policy for service migration is a threshold policy. We obtain the analytical solution for the cost resulting from arbitrary thresholds, and then propose an algorithm for finding the optimal thresholds. The proposed algorithm is more efficient than standard mechanisms for solving MDPs.