Evaluating the Impact of Micro-Data Center (μDC) Placement in an Urban Environment

The need for placing datacenter resources closer to the end-user is inarguable given the rise of computationally heavy services that have stringent latency requirements. This need becomes more straightforward in the expected proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and for the forthcoming 5^th generation (5G) mobile networks. However, in the context of Mobile Edge Computing, there is a lack of research activities about quantifying the important parameters that are helpful for the deployment of micro-datacenters (μDCs). For this reason, this paper provides an analysis of a citywide deployment of μDCs and an evaluation on how the different deployment scenarios affect both end-user Quality of Service (QoS) and Telco provider costs. In order to identify some guidelines to minimize such costs, the possibility of placing μDCs in the central offices hosting the Optical Line Terminals (OLTs) of the widely deployed Passive Optical Networks (PONs) has been explored. We utilized the publicly released dataset of the "Milano Grid" from the Open Big Data initiative and developed a simulation framework for user mobility that takes into account the effects of the user transitions on the generated traffic. Results illustrate the trade-off between the number of servers/power consumption and the per-user latency for varying μDC coverage area, and compare it to the deployment and energy costs ascribable to different ways of μDC dimensioning.

I. Introduction

With the IoT paradigm gaining a foothold in our everyday lives, the challenges brought to light by the diffusion of smart objects, like the increasing needs for quick response and processing, are receiving a lot of attention in the research environment.