Optimal Cloudlet Placement and User to Cloudlet Allocation in Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks

Mobile applications are becoming increasingly computation-intensive, while the computing capability of portable mobile devices is limited. A powerful way to reduce the completion time of an application in a mobile device is to offload its tasks to nearby cloudlets, which consist of clusters of computers. Although there is a significant body of research in mobile cloudlet offloading technology, there has been very little attention paid to how cloudlets should be placed in a given network to optimize mobile application performance. In this paper we study cloudlet placement and mobile user allocation to the cloudlets in a wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN). We devise an algorithm for the problem, which enables the placement of the cloudlets at user dense regions of the WMAN, and assigns mobile users to the placed cloudlets while balancing their workload. We also conduct experiments through simulation. The simulation results indicate that the performance of the proposed algorithm is very promising.