A comparative analysis of task scheduling algorithms of virtual machines in cloud environment

Abstract

Cloud computing is an interesting and beneficial area in modern distributed computing. It enables millions of users to use the offered services through their own devices or terminals. Cloud computing offers an environment with low cost, ease of use and low power consumption by utilizing server virtualization in its offered services (e.g., Infrastructure as a Service). The pool of Virtual Machines (VMs) in a cloud computing Data Center (DC) needs to be managed through an efficient task scheduling algorithm to maintain quality of service and resource utilization and thus ensure the positive impact of energy consumption in the cloud computing environment. In this study, an experimental comparative study is carried out among three task scheduling algorithms in cloud computing, namely, random resource selection, round robin and green scheduler. Based on the analysis of the simulation result, we can conclude which algorithm is the best for scheduling in terms of energy and performance of VMs. The evaluation of these algorithms is based on three metrics: Total power consumption, DC load and VM load. A number of experiments with various aims are completed in this empirical comparative study. The results showed that there is no algorithm that is superior to the others. Each has its own pros and cons. Based on the simulation performed, the green scheduler gives the best performance with respect to energy consumption. On the other hand, the random scheduler showed the best performance with respect to both VM and DC load. The round robin scheduler gives better VM and DC load than the green scheduler but have more energy consumption than both random and green schedulers. However, since the RR scheduler distributes the tasks fairly, the network traffic is balanced and neither the server nor the network node will get overloaded or congested. © 2015 Saleh Atiewi, Salman Yussof and Mohd Ezanee.