Erez Biton | Searcharxiv

arXiv2016

VM Scaling and Load Balancing via Cost Optimal MDP Solution

We address a cost optimization problem faced by a user who runs instances of applications in a remote cloud configuration constructed of multiple virtual machines (VMs). Each VM runs a single application instance which can execute tasks specific to that application. Managing the VMs involves a sophisticated trade-off between cloud-related demands, which are expressed by the provisional costs of leased cloud resources, and exogenous cost demands expressed by service revenues that are typically bound to SLAs. The internal costs may include VM deployment/termination cost, and VM lease cost. The exogenous costs refer to rewards accumulated due to the successfully accomplished tasks being run by each application instance. In the case where the SLA restricts performance to a certain load level at each VM, tasks incoming at VMs that reached that level are rejected. Rejections cause fines deducted against the rewards. The performance level is also quantified, namely, by means of a delay cost, according to the average delay experienced by tasks. Typical examples for specific applications which fall within this class of problems include handling of scientific worklflows and network functioning virtualization (NFV). We model this problem by cost-optimal load balancing to a queuing system with a flexible number of queues, where a queue (VM) can be deployed, can have a task directed to it and can be terminated. We analyze the system by Markov decision process (MDP) and numerically solve it to find the optimal policy, which captures the aforementioned costs and performance constraints. Within this constrained framework, we also investigate the impact of average VM deployment time. We show that the optimal policy possesses decision thresholds which depend on several parameters. We validate policies found by MDP, through directing an exogenous computational tasks flow to a set-up implemented on AWS.

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arXiv2012

Distributed Inter-Cell Interference Mitigation Via Joint Scheduling and Power Control Under Noise Rise Constraints

Consider the problem of joint uplink scheduling and power allocation. Being inherent to almost any wireless system, this resource allocation problem has received extensive attention. Yet, most common techniques either adopt classical power control, in which mobile stations are received with the same Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio, or use centralized schemes, in which base stations coordinate their allocations. In this work, we suggest a novel scheduling approach in which each base station, besides allocating the time and frequency according to given constraints, also manages its uplink power budget such that the aggregate interference, "Noise Rise", caused by its subscribers at the neighboring cells is bounded. Our suggested scheme is distributed, requiring neither coordination nor message exchange. We rigorously define the allocation problem under noise rise constraints, give the optimal solution and derive an efficient iterative algorithm to achieve it. We then discuss a relaxed problem, where the noise rise is constrained separately for each sub-channel or resource unit. While sub-optimal, this view renders the scheduling and power allocation problems separate, yielding an even simpler and more efficient solution, while the essence of the scheme is kept. Via extensive simulations, we show that the suggested approach increases overall performance dramatically, with the same level of fairness and power consumption.

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