Cloud applications heavily rely on the network communication infrastructure, whose stability and latency directly affect the quality of experience. As mobile devices need to rapidly retrieve data from the cloud, it becomes an extremely important goal to deliver the lowest possible access latency at the best reliability. In this paper, we specify a cloud access overlay protocol architecture to improve the cloud access performance in distributed data-center (DC) cloud fabrics. We explore how

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... ng virtual machine (VM) mobility and routing to user mobility can compensate performance decrease due to increased usercloud network distance, by building an online cloud scheduling solution to optimally switch VM routing locators and to relocate VMs across DC sites, as a function of user-DC overlay network states. We evaluate our solution (i) on a real distributed DC testbed spanning the whole France, showing that we can grant a very high transfer time gain, and (ii) by emulating the situation of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and over-the-top (OTT) cloud providers, exploiting many thousands real France-wide user displacement traces, finding a median throughput gain from 30% for OTT scenarii to 40% for ISP scenarii, the large majority of this gain being granted by adaptive VM mobility.