Fast Network Flow Resumption for Live Virtual Machine Migration on SDN

Virtual machine (VM) migration occurs very frequently in cloud computing. VM Migration enables a running OS, including memory and storage to move from one physical host to another physical host. A particular case of interest is live migration where the process of migrating the full state from one OS to the other should happen continuously and without any connection disruption. In order to have a seamless VM migration process the system has to be able to resume network connectivity very quickly. Fast resumption has proved to be a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a scheme to efficiently to migrate VMs networking resources using SDN techniques to achieve fast network flow resumption on SDN. We formulate the problem by an integer programming problem, we prove its NP-completeness and we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. Software simulation and real testbed implementation are done to demonstrate the performance of the flow migration scheme.