Energy consumption

Engineering

Efficient energy use

Operating system

Computer science

Cloud computing

Distributed computing

Computer network

Software-defined networking

Cloudlet

Electrical engineering

IEEE Network

This article introduces a green cloudlet network (GCN) architecture in the context of mobile cloud computing. The proposed architecture is aimed at providing seamless and low end-to-end delay between a UE and its Avatar (its software clone) in the cloudlets to facilitate the application workloads offloading process. Furthermore, an SDN-based core network is introduced in the GCN architecture by replacing the traditional Evolved Packet Core in the LTE network in order to provide efficient communications connections between different end points. The Cloudlet Network File System (CNFS) is designed based on the proposed architecture in order to protect the Avatars' dataset against hardware failures and improve Avatars' performance in terms of data access latency. Moreover, a green energy supplement is proposed in the architecture in order to reduce the extra OPEX and CO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> footprint incurred by running the distributed cloudlets. Due to the temporal and spatial dynamics of both the green energy generation and energy demands of green cloudlet systems (GCSs), designing an optimal green energy management strategy based on the characteristics of green energy generation and the energy demands of eNBs and cloudlets to minimize the on-grid energy consumption is critical to the cloudlet provider.

Green Cloudlet Network: A Distributed Green Mobile Cloud Network