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Building mobile networks, on demand and in an elastic manner, represents a vital solution for mobile operators to cope with the modest Average Revenues per User (ARPU), on one hand, and the ever-increasing mobile data traffic, on the other hand. An important research problem towards this vision of carrier cloud pertains to the development of adequate technologies and methods for the on-demand and dynamic provision of a decentralized and elastic mobile network as a cloud service over a distributed network of cloud-computing data centers, forming a federated cloud. An efficient mobile cloud cannot be built without efficient algorithms for the placement of network functions over this federated cloud. In this vein, this paper argues the need for avoiding or minimizing the frequency of mobility gateway relocations and discusses how this gateway relocation avoidance can be reflected in an efficient network function placement algorithm for the realization of mobile cloud. The proposed scheme is evaluated through computer simulations and encouraging results are obtained.
Taleb et al. (Sun,) studied this question.