An Efficient Priority Based Load Balancing Algorithm for Cloud Environment
Harmandeep Singh Brar, Vivek Thapar · 2014
Widespread use of computers for almost every task encountered in our day-to-day lives has increased the demand for resources like computing power, storage and bandwidth. The problem was initially addressed with the provisioning of computer networks, which later lead to the development of concepts and paradigms like distributed computing, grid computing and cluster computing. A recent addition to this list has been “cloud computing”, aiming to provide users with all their computing requirements through the notion of “services”. But such provisioning requires sophisticated techniques to handle the workload and respond to user requests in time. One of these major issues in cloud computing is load balancing, which is the process of assigning tasks to virtual machines in such a way that neither of them either gets overwhelmed by requests or remains idle for a longer duration. Such algorithms must be efficient enough as not to waste host resources and robust enough to withstand increasing number of users. Larger the organization, greater is the cost and hence the risk involved. It is therefore better and safe to analyze the risks involved in implementing the algorithms for providing a particular level of services. This involves an evaluation of the algorithms, applications and policies. The most successful and easy method is to simulate the working environment using a simulation tool. Cloudsim is a simulation toolkit that provides suitable facilities to model and simulate different types of cloud environments. It has a provision of applying any of the three existing cloud broker policies and load balancing algorithms, and also provides facility to extend the toolkit by implementing and testing newer algorithms. This paper proposes a priority based load balancing algorithm, wherein execution length of cloudlets is input as the workload to the system and is used to assign priority to the tasks. A comparison of the execution times of cloudlets is also being made using the proposed algorithm and the existing Round Robin load balancing algorithm.