Mobility of Internet-Based Virtual Computing Environment

The Internet-based virtual computing environment (iVCE) provides on-demand aggregation and autonomic collaboration mechanisms to facilitate the utilization of autonomous and dynamic Internet resources. Load balancing and fault tolerance are important issues when scheduling those transient resources. In this paper, we propose a mobility mechanism for the migration of various roles of agents in the iVCE platform. The mobility mechanism involves two parts of the iVCE platform: role container layer and event service layer. At the role container layer, a novel approach is proposed to handle the code and data mobility issue. At the event service layer, an efficient routing reconfiguration protocol is proposed based on a publish/subscribe system over DHTs to facilitate task migrations. Certain conditions must be satisfied before the migration of an agent to ensure the correctness of the whole process. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the mobility mechanism, and the experimental results show that it is suitable for implementing load balancing and fault tolerance in the iVCE.