A Wireless Virtual Machine Migration Scheme to Resolve Traffic Interference for Data Center Network

Abstract

Live virtual machine (VM) migration in a data center is necessary to solve the load-balancing, online maintenance, fault tolerance, and power management issues. Despite the functions mentioned above, it is difficult to handle live VM migration traffic with outbursts of large amounts of traffic in a hotspot, due to the congestion in the wired link. In this paper, we propose a novel live VM migration scheme, named Dumbo, which is a dedicated wireless network for migration; it extracts migration traffic from a data center network, and then transmits the extracted traffic over a dedicated wireless network. Moreover, due to the fact that the unstableness of a wireless links can degrade migration performance, Dumbo takes advantage of double TCP connections between the migration sources and the destinations using a multi-path TCP (MPTCP). Each TCP session is based on a wireless and wired link respectively; the wireless link acts as a main route for migration while the wired one is for a backup link. Through this scheme, we can eliminate the overhead of migration traffic and increase the overall network performance. To design this system, we employ the software defined networking (SDN) technologies to control the traffic flow. Also, we implement a dynamic provisioning based migration decision module which is located in the SDN controller, to decide when the VMs should be migrated and where to be migrated. The results of our experiment show the feasibility of wireless live VM migration with superior performance compared to other conventional solution.