Virtual machine placement in cloudlet mesh with network topology reconfigurability

The integration of cloudlet and wireless mesh networks gives rise to the idea of "cloudlet mesh", which offers services to the Internet of Things (IoT) applications at the edge of the network. With virtualized servers in each cloudlet, users issue networked virtual machines (VMs) to run their applications, and the cloudlet mesh broker or orchestrator decides the resource allocation. This process is known as the VM placement. With the network topology reconfigurability provided by the software defined networking (SDN) technologies, new opportunities arise to optimize the VM placement problem. In this paper, we address some of these opportunities. Firstly, we study the VM placement in the homogeneous case, where each cloudlet in the cloudlet mesh has the same number of VM slots and the same maximum bandwidth capacity. An optimal algorithm is proposed to maximize the number of accepted VMs into the homogeneous cloudlet mesh. Next, we focus on the VM placement in the heterogeneous case, where each cloudlet has different numbers of VM slots and different maximum bandwidth capacities. Another optimal algorithm is proposed to maximize the number of accepted VMs into the heterogeneous cloudlet mesh. The evaluation results validate the efficiency of our algorithms.