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Optimal deployment of smart home vertical applications

  • Rim Elfahem

Student thesis: Master's thesisMaster in Engineering: Information Technology Engineering

Abstract

Home automation services (such as home monitoring applications) are becoming more sophisticated and compute-intensive. Deploying such applications locally in houses can present challenges in terms of reliability, scalability, and performance due to limitations of resources. Therefore, migrating smart home applications to the cloud is of interest. However, the integration of smart home vertical applications with cloud computing faces two major challenges: i) how to map these applications to cloud resources while minimizing costs e.g. to pay only for the resources that are really used, and ii) how to automate the application deployment process. In this thesis, we present an application virtualization system which optimizes the deployment of smart home applications in a cloud environment. Our contribution is two-fold: The first contribution is OptiDep, an application placement solution for smart home applications aimed to minimize the mapping costs while maximizing the cloud resources’ utilization and maintaining the required Quality of Service (QoS) level. Unlike prior work, our solution considers multi-layer mapping which includes an application layer, a virtual layer, and a cloud infrastructure layer. It enables simultaneous node and link mappings, takes into account smart home applications specific requirements such as location and interdependencies and includes different types of compute and network capacities. It incorporates a pricing model and meets cloud infrastructure constraints. Mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is proposed to optimize the application placement problem. Evaluation of results showed that our solution reduces costs by 29% compared to a prior exact approach and more than 76 % compared to another heuristic-based solution. The second contribution is a design of a system that implements OptiDep to deploy smart home applications. The proposed system, based on OpenStack, automates the deployment of complex distributed applications in the cloud, which can be very useful when the same set of smart home services are deployed in multiple residences.
Date7 Jul 2017
Original languageAmerican English
Awarding Institution
  • École de technologie supérieure
SupervisorMohamed Cheriet (Supervisor) & Kim Khoa Nguyen (Co-supervisor)

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