Traffic-Aware Virtual Machine Placement in Cloudlet Mesh with Adaptive Bandwidth

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), the concept of "cloudlet" was proposed, which can be considered as a "micro data center in a box or node" deployed at the edge of the mobile network. The integration of cloudlet and wireless mesh networks gives rise to the idea of "cloudlet mesh", which offers services to a large number of IoT applications simultaneously. With virtualized servers in each cloudlet, users issue networked VMs to run their applications, and then the cloudlet mesh broker or orchestrator decides the resource allocation. This process is known as the VM placement. In our previous work, we proposed an algorithm to determine the maximum number of accepted VMs into the cloudlet mesh. In this paper, we study the traffic-aware VM placement problem in the cloudlet mesh. Firstly, we give a review of the algorithm proposed in our previous work, which obtains the maximum number of accepted VMs into the cloudlet mesh. Secondly, we design one optimal algorithm to minimize the total inter-cloudlet communication traffic in the cloudlet mesh. Thirdly, we study the VM placement problem under the multi-tenant scenario, which we prove to be NP-hard. A heuristic algorithm is proposed to give an efficient solution. The evaluation results validate the efficiency of our algorithm.