AALB: Application Aware Load Balancing Algorithm for Road Side Units

• Published in: Vehicular Communications Vol. 36; p. 100475
• Main Authors: Sahoo, Swagat Ranjan, Patra, Moumita, Gupta, Arobinda
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.08.2022
• Subjects: Load balancing; Road side units; Vehicular networks; VM migration; Vehicular networks; Road side units; Load balancing; VM migration
• ISSN: 2214-2096
• DOI: 10.1016/j.vehcom.2022.100475

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) have become an important part of a smart city environment. Vehicles are equipped with On-Board Units (OBUs) which allow them to run applications and communicate with Road Side Units (RSUs). RSUs can be connected to a local server with some amount of storage and computing resources to run Virtual Machines (VMs) to run application requests generated by vehicles. The tasks generated by vehicles may have different data generation rates and deadlines for completion. Running all the VMs to process the application requests at RSUs may make some of the RSUs overloaded, especially near road intersections where a larger number of vehicles are present. Hence, load balancing by migrating some VMs from overloaded RSUs to other RSUs with spare resources is needed to ensure that the applications complete within their deadlines. However, migration is costly and introduces additional delays, and hence it is important to reduce the migration cost. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called Application Aware Load Balancing (AALB) that schedules the VMs for the applications efficiently among the RSUs so as to try to maximize the number of VMs that complete while reducing the migration cost. Detailed simulation results are presented to evaluate the performance of AALB and compare it with three other existing algorithms. The results indicate that AALB performs better than the existing algorithms with respect to both the percentage of VMs completed and the migration cost.