Joint Resource Scheduling for Mobile Multimedia Services in Hierarchical Cloud Networks

With the explosive growth of Mobile Internet applications, the massive amount of data traffic produced by the data applications, such as mobile multimedia services, will bring big challenge to the next generation (5G) mobile communication networks. Recently, hierarchical cloud service networks have been proposed to address this big challenge. By introducing distributed hierarchical cloud network architecture, mobile users can enjoy efficient high-quality and low-delay local services. However, with the limited resources in the hierarchical cloud networks, it is essential to develop efficient resource scheduling and content delivery mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation for hierarchical cloud networks. We propose a Joint Resource Allocation (JRA) scheme, aiming at improving resource utilization, as well as reducing the content access delay to improve user Quality of Experience (QoE). Our fundamental idea is to jointly allocate spectrum and energy resources in wireless networks, caching and processing resources in Cloudlets, to maximize overall system resource utilization. We conduct simulation experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed JRA scheme. Numerical results show that the performance of JRA in terms of content access delay and resource utilization can be significantly improved compared with traditional schemes.