Determining Server Locations in Server Migration Service to Minimize Monetary Penalty of Dynamic Server Migration

In this paper, we propose a new class of service called server migration service (SMS) to augment the existing IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). SMS allows servers (server-side processes of a network application) to dynamically and automatically migrate as their clients (client-side processes of a network application) change their locations in order to reduce the total monetary penalty that the SMS provider pays to its SMS subscribers when failing to provide them with the guaranteed level of QoS. In this paper, we consider the monetary impact that arises from QoS degradation due to server migration and build an integer programming model to determine when and to which location servers should migrate to minimize the total monetary penalty incurred by the SMS provider. Numerical examples show that SMS achieves up to 96% lower total monetary penalty compared to that without server migration. Numerical examples also show that the integer programming model developed in this paper requires reasonable computation time under realistic parameter settings.