Towards Virtual Machine Migration in Fog Computing

Handoff mechanisms allow mobile users to move across multiple wireless access points while maintaining their voice and/or data sessions. A traditional handoff process is concerned with smoothly transferring a mobile device session from its current access point (or cell) to a target access point (or cell). These handoff characteristics are sufficient for voice calls and background data transfers, however nowadays many mobile applications are heavily based on data and processing capabilities from the cloud. Such applications, especially those that require greater interactivity, often demand not only a smooth session transfer, but also the maintenance of quality of service requirements that impact a user's experience. In this context, the Fog Computing paradigm arises to overcome delays encountered when applications need low latency to access data or offload processing to the cloud. Fog computing introduces a distributed cloud layer, composed of cloudlets (i.e., "small clouds" with lower computational capacity), between the user and the cloud. Cloudlets allow low latency access to data or processing capabilities, which can be accomplished by offering a VM to the user. An overview of Fog computing is first providing, relating it to general concepts in Cloud-based systems, followed by a general architecture to support virtual machine migration in this emerging paradigm - discussing both the benefits and challenges associated with such migration.