SEA: Stable resource allocation in geographically distributed clouds

Today´s public cloud providers typically deploy their small sized data centers in multiple geographically different locations, so as to improve data center power usage effectiveness and locate resources closer to users. A major challenge is resource allocation. Many results have been reported regarding this issue from the perspectives of virtual machine consolidation, network-aware virtual machine placement, traffic engineering, dynamic capacity provisioning, and so on. However, there has not been any focus on stable resource allocations, where no resource request or data center has any migration incentives. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt at gaining a better understanding of the structure of the Stable rEsource Allocation (SEA) problem. We introduce a formal problem statement and develop two algorithms for the 1-dimensional (1-D) and 2-D cases, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms have good scalability and convergence.