Cloud-over-WOBAN (CoW): An Offloading-Enabled Access Network Design

Today's access networks are increasingly shaped by the services that they provide to the end users. In a hybrid wireless-optical broadband access network (WOBAN), to access any service, the corresponding requests for the services and responses require multi-hop communication over the wireless mesh network (WMN) and Passive Optical Network (PON) subsequently over the Internet to some server in the application service provider's domain. This may cause bottlenecks in the WMN and may result in degraded performance. In this paper, we propose a design for WOBAN that integrates a cloud over WOBAN (CoW) that provides different "cloud services" from within the access network. This has multiple benefits: 1) it offloads traffic over wireless links, 2) it reduces bottleneck from the gateways of WOBAN, 3) it reduces delays, and 4) it allows providers to facilitate different cloud services with their access network. In this paper, we study the issue of determining how the cloud components providing the services should be placed in WOBAN in order to optimize the resources while providing better service. We formulate this problem as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) and solve it on a realistic study case. We show that, by integrating cloud with WOBAN, we can obtain significant performance improvement.