A ‘Follow-Me’ computing scheme based on virtual machine movement for QoS improvement in mobile cloud computing environments
Xu Gaochao1, Ding Yan1, Ou Shumao2, Hu Liang1, Zhao Jia3
COMPUTER MODELLING & NEW TECHNOLOGIES 2014 18(4) 74-81
1 College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Qianjin Str. 2699, 130012 Changchun, China
2 Department of Computing and Communication Technologies, Oxford Brookes University, Wheatley, Oxford OX33 1HX, United Kingdom
3 College of Computer Science and Engineering, ChangChun University of Technology, Yan’an Str. 2055, 130012 Changchun, China
Mobile cloud computing utilizes virtualized cloud computing technologies in the mobile Internet. To improve Quality of Service (QoS) and execution efficiency of mobile cloud applications, we propose a novel computing scheme called “Follow-Me” (FM), which is based on live wide-area virtual machine (VM) migration. In a virtualized mobile cloud environment based on the VMs of cloud side and mobile devices of user side, the purpose of the proposed FM scheme is to migrate the corresponding VM in real-time when a mobile device moves from one service area to another. FM obtains the current positions of mobile devices, estimates the next servicing areas, and finally migrates the VMs along with the mobile users’ movement. The proposed FM scheme has been tested in an experimental environment by using the CloudSim platform. The experimental results demonstrate that FM evidently improves the QoS of mobile cloud computing compared with the existing approaches. FM achieves a better average service response time, a clearly smaller error rate and consumes less energy.