Supporting Seamless Virtual Machine Migration via Named Data Networking in Cloud Data Center

Virtual machine migration has been touted as one of the crucial technologies in improving data center efficiency, such as reducing energy cost and maintaining load balance. However, traditional approaches could not avoid the service interruption completely. Moreover, they often result in longer delay and are prone to failures. In this paper, we leverage the emerging named data networking (NDN) to design an efficient and robust protocol to support seamless virtual machine migration in cloud data center. Specifically, virtual machines (VMs) are named with the services they provide. Request routing is based on service names instead of IP addresses that are normally bounded with physical machines. As such, services would not be interrupted when migrating supported VMs to different physical machines. We further analyze the performance of our proposed NDN-based VM migration protocol, and optimize its performance via a load balancing algorithm. Our extensive evaluations verify the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach and demonstrate that it is interruption-free.