Multipath Transmission Control Protocol for Live Virtual Machine Migration in the Cloud Environment

Abstract

For mobile cloud computing (MCC), a local virtual machine- (VM-) based cloudlet is proposed to improve the performance of real-time resource-intensive mobile applications. When a mobile device (MD) discovers a cloudlet nearby, it takes some time to build up a virtual machine (VM) inside the cloudlet before data offloading from the MD to the VM can begin. Live virtual machine migration refers to the process of transferring a running Virtual Machine (VM) from one host to another without interrupting its state. Theoretically, live migration process must not render the instance being migrated unavailable during its execution. However, in practice, there is always a service downtime associated with the process. This paper focuses on addressing the need to reduce the service downtime in case of live VM migration in cloud and providing a solution by implementing and optimizing the multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP) ability within an Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud to increase the efficiency of live migration. We have also introduced an algorithm, the α-best fit algorithm, to optimize the usage of bandwidth and to effectively streamline the MPTCP performance.