Network in the Air

Today, on-board passengers request Internet-based services, such as video streaming, Voice over IP, etc., at low cost. Many of those services have stringent QoS requirements, e.g., low end-to-end delay. To offer these services efficiently, some problems need to be solved jointly: placement of services (i.e., Virtual Machines (VMs)), at Datacenters (DCs) on the ground, assigning airplanes to services on DCs, and the routing from the flight to the associated VM considering the dynamic position of the flights over time. Further, dynamic VM migrations can be employed for guaranteeing the QoS requirements and/or improving resource utilization. In this work, we introduce and evaluate two heuristic solutions to jointly determine VM placement, routing, and migration decisions for flying airplanes with the objective of minimizing total operational costs. The first results indicate that while reducing the runtime from hours to seconds, the heuristics are able to achieve near-optimal solutions.