Virtual Machine Placement Method with Compressed Sensing-Based Traffic Volume Estimation

In cloud computing environments with virtual machines (VMs), we propose a VM placement (VMP) method based on traffic estimation to balance loads due to traffic volumes within physical hosts (PHs) and passing through physical network interface cards (NICs). We refer to a VM or a NIC in a cloud environment as node, and define a flow as a pair of nodes. To balance loads for both PHs and NICs, it is necessary to measure flow traffic volumes because each VM may connect to other VMs in different PHs. However, this is not a cost-effective way to measure flow traffic volumes because the number of flows increases with O ( N 2 ) for the number N of nodes. To solve this problem, we propose a VMP method using a compressed sensing (CS)-based traffic estimator. In the proposed method, the relationship between flow traffic volumes and node traffic volumes is formulated by a system of underdetermined linear equations. The flow traffic volumes are estimated with CS from the measured node traffic volumes. From the estimated flow traffic volumes, each VM is assigned to the optimal host for load balancing by solving a mixed-integer optimization problem.