Live Migration of Virtualized Edge Networks: Analytical Modeling and Performance Evaluation

Following the current evolution of virtualization techniques and software defined networking, edge networks might evolve towards a fully virtualized implementation by means of a number of virtual machines working cooperatively to perform the tasks of existing network middleboxes. In such a scenario the possibility to migrate groups of cooperating virtual machines as a whole set may be a very important feature, but what will be the performance issues of this solution? The live migration performance of multiple virtual machines working in some sort of correlated manner is a topic that has not been widely studied in the literature. This manuscript presents a model reasonably simple to implement that may be used to derive some performance indicators such as the whole service downtime and the total migration time. The model is used to compare some scheduling strategies for the migration and provide guidelines to such implementation.