Location Matters: Optimal Data Placement in Mobile Telecom Cloud

Mobile Telecom Cloud (MTC) refers to cloud services provided by mobile telecommunication companies. Since mobile network operators support the last-mile Internet access to users, they have advantages over other cloud providers by providing users with better mobile connectivity and required QoS. As users continue to require higher bandwidth and lower delay, mobile companies can exploit their unique role in the Internet access to meet the increasing demands, which are hard to guarantee by other pure computing companies. In addition, to save cost in cloud services, mobile network operators are in a stronger position to utilize their existing infrastructure, which are geographically distributed in nature. The dilemma in meeting higher QoS demands while saving cost poses a big challenge to MTC providers. We tackle this challenge by strategically placing users´ data in distributed switching centres to minimize the total system cost and maximize users´ satisfaction. We formulate and solve the optimization problems using linear programming (LP)based branch-and-bound and LP with rounding. For scalability, we propose a similarity-based clustering method to group users into classes. Simulation results show that with the help of our optimization algorithms, we can effectively reduce the system cost and enhance users´ QoS.