Seamless Live Virtual Machine Migration with Cloudlets and Multipath TCP

Techniques using a nearby virtual machine (VM) based cloudlet have been proposed for mobile cloud computing (MCC) to enhance the performance of real-time resource-intensive mobile applications. After a mobile device (MD) discovers a cloudlet in the vicinity, it takes time to set up a VM inside the cloudlet before data offloading from the MD to the VM starts. The time between discovering the cloudlet and actual offloading of data is considered as a service initiation time. When multiple cloudlets are presented in a nearby geographical location, initiating a service with each cloudlet may be frustrating for cloudlet users when changing location. In order to eliminate the delay caused by the service initiation time after moving away from the source cloudlet, this paper proposed a seamless live VM migration between neighbour cloudlets. A seamless live VM migration is achieved with the prior knowledge of the migrating VM IP address in the destination cloudlet and more importantly with multipath TCP (MPTCP). We have performed a number of experiments to validate the proposed approach using the Linux KVM hyper visor. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach and also performance improvement. Specifically, there is zero downtime at the destination cloudlet after the migration is completed.