Convergence of heterogeneous network and IT infrastructures in support of fixed and mobile Cloud services

This paper proposes a next generation ubiquitous converged infrastructure to support Cloud and mobile Cloud computing services. The proposed infrastructure facilitates interconnection of fixed and mobile end users with IT resources through a heterogeneous network integrating optical metro and wireless access networks. To support the Infrastructure as a Service paradigm, the proposed architecture adopts the concept of virtualization across the technology domains involved. To optimally plan the proposed virtual infrastructures a holistic approach considering jointly the presence of all network technology domains and the IT resources is applied. Our modelling results identify trends and trade-offs relating to end-to-end service delay, resource requirements and energy consumption levels of the infrastructure across the various technology domains.