Virtual machine provisioning through satellite communications in federated Cloud environments

Cloud federation offers plenty of new services and business opportunities. However, many advanced services cannot be implemented in the real Cloud market due to several issues that have not been overcome yet. One of these concerns is the transfer of huge amount of data among federated Clouds. This paper aims to overcome such a limitation proposing an approach based on satellite communications. By comparing performance in data delivery on the Internet and satellite systems, it is evident that satellite technologies are enough ripe to be competitive against systems with a wired infrastructure. Thus, we propose to make use of satellite transmission to implement fast delivery of huge amount of data. Through the discussion of a use case, where a WEB TV company offers a streaming service, we show how to practically apply the proposed strategy in a real scenario, specifying the involvement of Cloud providers, Cloud users, satellite companies and end-user clients. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.