Mobile Telecom Cloud brokerage with orchestrated multi-tier resource pooling

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 quality of service (QoS). Compared to other third-party cloud (TPC) providers such as Amazon and Google, however, MTC providers usually have a much smaller scale of computing resources. This paper presents an approach for MTC providers to take advantage of both MTC and TPC so that they can offer better and cheaper cloud services to their customers. The opportunity comes from the discounts that TPC normally offers to group buyers as well as the better QoS that MTC can support. Our solution is to allow MTC providers to act as a brokerage, called MTC brokerage, to broker TPC cloud resources and integrate the resources reserved from TPC with those of their own MTC. We address the technical challenges of optimally allocating users' cloud requests to MTC and TPC data centres to meet users' QoS requirement with minimum cost. We also study the price range that can be profitable to a MTC brokerage. We then investigate the resource reservation problem with dynamic request changes. We evaluate our solution using real Google traces collected over a 29-day period from a Google cluster. The results show that our solution results in cost savings for both MTC providers and their customers.