Optimal Virtual Machines Allocation in Mobile Femto-cloud Computing: an MDP Approach

Offloading to external surrogate machines (part of) the workload generated by applications running on mobile nodes has been suggested as a way to improve the mobile user experience. In this paper, we consider a set of mobile users that can offload their computation on Virtual Machines (VMs) instantiated in a cloud infrastructure implemented over a set of femtocells which have been augmented with computational resources. In this setting, a critical task is to determine where users VMs should be allocated across the different femtocells as to optimize the user performance. In this paper we formulate the VMs allocation problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) based optimization, to directly take into account the system dynamics and optimize the long term performance. The optimal policy is obtained solving the MDP using a Linear Programming reformulation. We illustrate the behavior of the proposed policy in simple scenarios.