Chapter Three - ClPyZ: A testbed for cloudlet federation.

In the field of computing, the research conducted is largely of applied nature and for an applied research it is very vital to conduct experimentations and present results. These experimentations can be conducted using simulators, emulators, or real time testbeds. The data used to conduct these experiments can be synthetic or real. The researchers are often faced with challenges of finding a suitable instrument and environment to conduct and validate their research. This chapter presents a similar challenge of finding a suitable virtualization platform to mimic cloudlet federation and provides a viable solution by proposing a novel virtualization platform by the name of ClPyZ. The focus of this study is to highlight the fact that there is a lack of availability of simulators, emulators and virtualization platforms to conduct experimentations in this domain and a new virtualization platform is thus required. Cloudlet Computing is a variant of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) that aims to provide the computational facility in closer proximity of the user to enhance Quality of Services (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) for the resource constrained mobile devices. The concept of federation is used to pool resources among different cloudlets. ClPyZ does not only mimic a cloudlet federation but also offers resource sharing and load balancing at the cloudlet level to avoid remote request forwarding that results in improved performance. ClPyZ is an open source virtualization platform developed at Advanced Communication Networks Lab for research purposes. It can manage multiple cloudlets even if they belong to different clouds. A central broker manages all the affairs of the cloudlet federation such as cloudlet registration, finding an optimal cloudlet for task offloading and information exchange between member cloudlets. The required features for the inception of a federated cloudlet model include multi-cloud management, scalability, resource sharing, monitoring, Virtual Machine (VM) migration, and load balancing.