Virtual machine live migration for pervasive services in cloud-assisted vehicular networks

The physical resources of vehicles and roadside infrastructures are stringently constrained in vehicular networks. The application of mobile cloud computing technology will significantly improve the utilization of intensive physical resources. In the newly emerged paradigm of cloud-assisted vehicular networks, vehicle mobility poses a significant challenge to the continuity of cloud services. This paper proposes efficient Virtual Machine (VM) live migration mechanisms to deal with the problem. In particular, a selective dirty page transfer strategy is designed to enhance the efficiency of data transfer in VM live migration. Besides, an optimal resource reservation scheme is proposed to ensure sufficient physical resources at a target cloud site such that migration dropping is significantly reduced. Simulations are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency of the two proposed mechanisms.